We Forgot How to Make Some Nuclear Bomb Parts | Hacker News Reader

We Forgot How to Make Some Nuclear Bomb Parts

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6 pointsOhMeadhbh4 comments

How hard would it be to pay a handsome sum to just one guy who was familiar enough to get enough of a clue? I don't know how things are siloed but presumably plenty know what its for we are just missing some crucial steps. Man I'd love to join a team to figure out some small part. You meet the wildest range of people working on such things.

I'm missing what was the way of testing for equivalency. Seems a crucial step in understanding the overall story.

I'm wondering if adding extra checks can hamper future efforts at production, because you are going to nail down your tests today. Then in the future some crucial part of the process is technically impossible due to upstream shortages. You didn't understand your wiggle room when you locked down your tests (potentially).

I heard people mumbling about this several jobs ago and just assumed it was HIGHLY CLASSIFIED. Turns out that no, people can talk about it in public. Or at least high-level discussions. Nothing about the specific details. But it seems somewhere between the mid-90s and 2008, the people who knew how to make a material code-named FOGBANK retired and the material was so super-secret, we didn't write down detailed notes. This is a brief blurb from LANL about how they reverse-engineered the FOGBANK process from the information they did have.

Also... this gets me thinking about nuclear deterrence. What if we knew that our nukes wouldn't work. Sure, we can probably get a plutonium core to go boom, but what if the fusion side of an H-Bomb was so secret we forgot to write down the recipe. That may mean we have a bunch of bombs that will detonate with a yield MUCH lower than anticipated.

So if we decided to use such a weapon, and it fizzled, everyone would probably notice that it fizzled. And I suspect the first thing on everyone else's minds would be "Hmm... America's nukes aren't as powerful as they've been claiming." And sure... you don't want to get smacked with a uranium or plutonium bomb, but if you're some other nuclear power (France or Russia, perhaps) and you HAVEN'T detonated a bomb, everyone else in the nuclear club won't know if your bombs are crap or if you actually knew what you were doing with respect to maintaining your stockpile.

So... you know... just one more reason to not detonate nuclear devices in the middle east.

Lifetimes of nuclear weapons and their deterioration with age is thoroughly studied and was one of the drivers of development of supercomputers starting with the early 1990s when nuclear testing was stopped.

Ongoing work on rebuilding plutonium cores in the US is driven by their predicted deterioration with age (as helium caverns accumulate in them), making their behaviour less predictable (even if not knowingly worse).

And new nukes are built every year, just in low (~10 a year) quantities - fully from scratch. In addition to refurbishment work for much larger numbers of them.

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