Did America Forget How to Make the H-Bomb? (2009)

They did forget/lose the recipe.

Now imagine some key technology that appears to be "less important" and with "smaller budget". It will never come back; it will be lost foever.

Modern technological society is always less than a generation away from "losing the recipe" for any given critical but ignored technology. I saw this at HP and it can be as quick as 2-5 years in some cases.

And this applies to outsourced technology infrastructure - once outsourced, you can NOT just flip a switch to bring it back - it will take 20-50 years to bring it back and only if you fund continuously (not continually).

the supposedly forgotten component is made of a proprietary polystyrene resin, and the physical form is also important the density must be varied along the axis of the hohlraum [reflector cavity] resulting in modulation of fission derived neutron velocity and energy to a magnitude resulting in the initiation of the fusion components.

No. Someone just wasn’t being paid to keep the aerogel production line on cold standby.

[1] http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/padwp/pdfs/nwj2_09.pdf