Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

In two decades of crawling through most of the declassified public nuclear material from the US nuclear weapons program, some exposure to classified material, and numerous hours of interviews with working and retired nuclear scientists he believes it's the single most detailed schematic of an actual specific type of warhead he's seen so far.

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/about-me/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Wellerstein

As he's blogging about this it's almost certain he has had real current working nuclear weapons experts from his contact list read the advances and not disagree.

Correct or not, it's not a casual random thought from someone with no exposure to such diagrams.

I also doubt it's useful, but Ted Taylor could supposedly walk around a room full of nukes and guess based on the shape of the casing what was unique about a design

> ... at least historically, the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor organizations have frowned on disinformation and misinformation for other very practical reasons. If you release a lie, you run the risk of someone noticing it is a lie, which can draw more attention to the reality. And even misinformation/inaccuracy can put “brackets” around the possibilities of truth. The goal of these organizations is to leave a total blank in the areas that they don’t want people to know about, and misinformation/disinformation/inaccuracy is something other than a total blank.

In other words, the author expected to see a previously familiar schematic or nothing. This is clearly not nothing, and also not a familiar schematic, hence the surprise.

Figure 13.9, “Unclassified Illustration of a Staged Weapon (Source: TCG-NAS-2, March 1997),” from the Nuclear Matters Handbook 2020 (Revised), published by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters.

Two circles in a box, maybe inside of a reentry vehicle. That’s it. Nothing that gives any actual sense of size, location, materials, physicality.”

The next paragraph details what the author would have expected to be published by comparison.

And then figure 13.9 is what the DoD expects to see published at all.

Any further use isn't very surprising. Once it is approved and in the wild, re-using it is not really a problem (especially if being run through the same office for approval again).

Read the article and look at the "officially sanctioned" diagram. This looks like the tl;dr of what he things about this:

> Anyway, I’m just surprised the DOE would release any image that gave really any implied graphical structure of a thermonuclear secondary, even if it is clearly schematic and meant to be only somewhat representative. It’s more than they usually allow!

This linked post of his about an earlier redaction mistake also makes it clear (https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2021/05/17/how-not-to-redact...):

> ...but we’re given a rare glimpse inside of modern thermonuclear warheads. Now, there isn’t a whole lot of information that one can make out from these images. The main bit of “data” are the roughly “peanut-shaped” warheads, which goes along with what has been discussed in the open literature for decades about how these sorts of highly-efficient warheads are designed. But the Department of Energy doesn’t like to confirm such accounts, and certainly has never before let us glimpse anything quite as provocative about these warheads. The traditional bomb silhouettes for these warheads are just the dunce-cap re-entry vehicles, not the warheads inside of them.

Presumably there are uses that need old steel but they are probably smaller amounts.

But here’s the thing: that internal culture is just as opaque to outsiders as the technology itself! No outsider actually knows how the internal folks think, feel, and decide about little graphics or schematics or whatever. They’ve just inferred some heuristics from incomplete data.

And this is basically just saying “this little graphic seems to violate my heuristics.” Which makes for interesting reading, but there is no real actual objectively verifiable content in this article.

Betteridge’s Law tells us the answer to the headline question is always “no.” And in this case I think common sense agrees: Sandia Lab probably did not give the entire thermonuclear ballgame away with a logo graphic.

You have a technical expertise just close enough to, but firewalled from the actual doe nk physics, where maybe the same image couldn't be released by anyone with doe clearance.

But the guy a few buildings over just doing 'hypothetical' center of gravity modeling? Doesn't necessarily have to live by the exact same rules or go through the same release/declass process as someone with actual weapons schematics.

It leaves a lot still unanswered- but explains away some of the seemingly self- contradictory Sandia policy discussed in the article.

In industrial speak: inside-the-fence vs outside-the-fence regulatory framework, or something similar.

Sometimes the guy outside the fence 'gets away with things' because those things are OK to do outside the fence.

The most frustrating thing about being a designer in those environments is the dunning-krueger cockiness many technical people have in their understanding of design, which they usually believe is purely an aesthetic consideration.*

It's not even like a junior developer trying to 'correct' a senior developer about coding practices in a dev meeting— the better analog is a designer that watched a half hour Coding for Designers talk at a conference trying to correct a senior developer about coding practices in a stand-up, because they'd never have been invited to the dev meeting to begin with. If there were only designers in that meeting— and they likely find the other designer more credible because they jibe with their perspective, don't realize how important the developers input is, and might have watched that same conference talk— that could damage a project. In my experience, designers are way more likely to be solo in meetings with developers and the echo chamber of developer 'expertise' on design drowns out actual professional design expertise. In most FOSS projects, is bleaker than that because designers don't even bother trying.

* though completely out-of-context "rules" born from Tufte quotes aren't uncommon. In art school, we were told that we need to understand the rules in order to know when to break them. Imagine someone who'd never driven before that memorized a few pages of the driving manual calling you an unqualified driver because your actions didn't comply with the letter of one page they memorized even if it was qualified by another, or required for safety.

> MACE (Modal Analysis Correlation Exercise) assembly, and was created by the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in the 1990s to serve as a sort of a Utah Teapot of weapons structural modeling: a benign shape that could be used to test aspects of the code that would nonetheless tell you if the code would work for real weapons assemblies.

I did finite element model preparation for a living many year ago and it did not only involve heavy defeaturing but interestingly also remeshing with quads.

Renderers love triangles, FE solvers love boring quads.

This story is probably nothing interesting because this went through all the public use approvals needed for public presentations and being available on osti.gov.

It is probably just a toy test problem used on a capabilities logo for Sierra. Maybe it comes from some sort of integration test that is easier to run than the actual problem.

> Someone reminded me of something I had seen years ago: the British nuclear program at Aldermaston, when it has published on its own computer modeling in the past, used a sort of “bomb mockup” that looks far more deliberately “fake” than this Sandia one. I offer this up as what I would think is a more “safe” approach than something that looks, even superficially, like a “real” secondary design:

> This is called the MACE (Modal Analysis Correlation Exercise) assembly, and was created by the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in the 1990s to serve as a sort of a Utah Teapot of weapons structural modeling: a benign shape that could be used to test aspects of the code that would nonetheless tell you if the code would work for real weapons assemblies.

Updating a logo (especially a bad logo) after a couple of years is not exactly a newsworthy event. If you replaced any other part I would not assume it was to correct an accidental disclosure of classified information.

It is not even clear if when he speaks about "safe" is he talking about being safe from nuclear proliferation, or safe from clueless bureaucrats causing you legal trouble.

The fission stage in that warhead has numerous refinements that help miniaturize it, for instance the implosion is probably not spherical so it can fit in the pointy end of the warhead. A really refined modern weapon is packed with details like that.

That’s not really true. If you manage to independently come up with classified info and release it to the public, you will get a visit from an agency.

Overall I think you’re correct.

That is not how nuclear secrets work. The US Department of Energy holds that restricted data (a special kind of classification that only applies to nuclear secrets) is "born secret". That means, even if you come up with a concept for a nuclear weapon completely independently without ever talking to anyone, it is considered classified information that you are not allowed to redistribute. This doctrine is highly controversial and the one time it has been tried in court the verdict was inconclusive, but to this day it is how the DoE interprets the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

In general this is very precarious to attempt to enforce, of course. If the DoE sues someone because they published their nuclear weapon designs, that'd be seen as a tacit admission that the design could potentially work. Nevertheless they actually did do this at one point (United States v. Progressive, Inc., 1979).

> I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does, instead of sleeping), and one particular slide jumped out at me:

The author is making fun of themselves for being up late reading this deck instead of sleeping. They’re not making fun of the person who posted the slide deck.