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Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

This is a wild take, that this military intelligence isn't useful to opposing militaries, and that hydrogen bombs aren't a pretty damn dangerous thing to risk leaking. I'd much rather people be overcautious with respect to nukes than undercautious. Hasn't 2020 taught us to respect tail risks a bit better than that?

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An under-appreciated aspect of most traditional engineering disciplines is how many unknowns there are from materials science, physics, quality control, and manufacturing precision.

You could know the shape, mechanics, yield, make-up, and components of the Fat-Man device while still being thousands of experiments and a multi-billion dollar industrial infrastructure away from being able to build one.

We got very lucky that it so happens that the fissible isotope of uranium is the rare one. Although I forget if there's a relationship with half life, so it might be inevitable?

Natural Uranium is not very radioactive. For example, it would take Uranium 4.5 billion years to release the same amount of radiation that Francium does in 22 minutes.

> a multi-billion dollar industrial infrastructure away from being able to build one.

This is true! And the biggest reason why despite AQ Kahn selling a "make your own fat man" kit only a few countries were successful with it.

However, additive manufacturing poses a big nuclear proliferation risk. Being able to manufacture accurate parts for cheap, without advanced export controlled equipment, poses serious issues.

As the other commenter said, showing people how to get eggs and flour is not the same as baking them a cake. The vast majority of the information is a by-product of treating our nation like a business: we now have shareholders to account for, and their collective vested interests are preventing the rest of the world from using this information to update reactors in France or advance experimentation at CERN.

lol, society extrapolating. Nope.

I had the same reaction. Of course society is not going to take the lessons "learned" from a global pandemic and apply them to other fields. As soon as things go back to "normal", people will forget and repeat the same processes that got them into the situations that the pandemic "revealed".

I had the exact same thought. And why make it easy for an adversary? The game is about staying ahead, and part of that is making sure they don’t know exactly what you’re working on.

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