Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

> The Manhattan project was able uranium purified to get a bomb working without PLCs and networks.

By enlisting thousands of young women to watch the knobs and dial buttons.

https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/articles/women-who-buil...

They didn't even know they were building the bomb. They just had to enter the room, dial knobs back-and-forth for 8-hours/day, and then go home.

Today, that sort of stuff SHOULD be automated. It made sense back then because there weren't computers, but... you really can't just get people to balance knobs 8-hours / day anymore.

-------

EDIT: https://www.energy.gov/articles/five-fast-facts-about-calutr...

Seems like Department of Energy has some historical articles on them too.

View on HN

The youth unemployment rate in Iran is ~25%, overall rate is 10%. They issue their own fiat currency, and their GDP per capita is comparable to Thailand and Botswana.

So yes, they can probably afford to have a bunch of people tweak knobs in a factory all day.

There is also a very deep dissatisfaction towards the government amongst people.

Imagine them hiring dozens of resentful, rebellious teens to watch the dials of their budding nuclear programme. It’s like something from Futurama

> Imagine them hiring dozens of resentful, rebellious teens to watch the dials of their budding nuclear programme. It’s like something from Futurama

So the idea might not work for Iran, but it probably would for North Korea.

Are you implying that if they were a richer, more prosperous country, then they couldn't afford it? I'm confused

If the job market is more saturated, there’s simply fewer people available to do bullshit work, at the necessary bullshit cost. Resources would be naturally allocated to more valuable efforts, and lured by better wages, by the market. As a general rule, the richer the country, the more expensive humans are, and the commodities become cheaper (relative to income)

In the US, I can’t afford a full time maid. In India, I could probably afford 10.

Or more pointedly, in the US you can afford a car far earlier than you can afford a maid. In India, it’s the opposite.

I understand your point, but how does minimum wage for unskilled workers factor? For example, in the US you could pay some $8/hour to 500 teenagers to achieve the same net result. No?

$8/hr gets pretty expensive pretty quick.

It‘s why, for example, middle class households in the US don‘t have live in maids, because rising living standards made that unaffordable at a middle class income level.

It makes it worse — if the job only makes sense (produces value at least at) $7.50/hr, you simply can’t execute it — even if you had people willing to work at that wage (because no better alternative exists)

An interesting aspect of poorer economy I’ve noted but haven’t seen anyone discuss otherwise is you can live a much better life being poor in India, than you can in the US — the really low income economy is far healthier (the quality of everything degrades continuously). I’m sure it’s not a novel insight, but I don’t know what others would call it.

In the US you pass under the minimum wage bar of value production and you’re immediately in a tent under an LA bridge — with everyone else ranging from $7.99/hr to $0.01/hr. Of course an economy exists to support them anyways, but it’s largely underground, illegal (bypassing safety and regulations, e.g. selling very old cars; selling cigarettes individually) and actively zoned into oblivion

There are many options that lie between "network-connected grey-import PLCs from the 90s" and "have a human tweak a knob to zero a needle scale".

> So yes, they can probably afford to have a bunch of people tweak knobs in a factory all day.

But what would prevent this system from being compromised?

Seems pretty easy for an adversary to "inject an exploit in these controllers" by paying a few of them to keep the knobs in the wrong position for a bit more time than strictly necessary, or to flip a switch earlier/later than ideal.

Auditing this is seems worse than checking the code for an old-style, non-networked, PLC.

Last I had heard, Iran's youth unemployment situation certainly would make that feasible...

>you really can't just get people to balance knobs 8-hours / day anymore

Why not?

Today, we've automated that with electronic computer chips, which also don't know the significance of what they're doing computations for.

such an activity would also be a lot harder to hide today with eyes in space capturing everything in high-res

Also, mass tracking through mobile devices. Even if said devices are in faraday cages, it doesn't take a genius to see that something exists in some area when there are many devices going dark and then coming back up again after some hours. It only takes access to cellphone towers and data.

still impressive secrecy management

But still not good enough.

Legend has it that Stalin knew about the American bomb before Truman knew about it. Hiring literally thousands of high-schoolers without much job training has the advantages of being cheap back then, but you don't really know who was or wasn't a Soviet Agent.

Similarly: having literally thousands of modern techs build a bomb manually would only turn the computer-security problem into a human-security problem. Who do you trust? Who do you keep track of?

There's something to be said about trusting fewer people: and checking those few people more vigorously. That simplifies the human-security portion of the puzzle, even if it complicates the computer-security portion.

That's what I was curious about. Indeed the more persons the more leaks potentially, yet it seems that they took care of dilluting knowledge so nobody really knew what was for. I'd love to read about the soviet side of this story.

Not without scheduled Instagram breaks you won't.

I don’t know, with a good pair of headphones and podcasts, it could be tolerable

These are bold words coming from someone browsing HN during work hours (making massive timezone/ work schedule assumptions).

could just be speaking from experience, on their scheduled HN break

Reply on news.ycombinator.com