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Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
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- virgulino 2y agoFor anyone interested in the basics of nuclear weapons, I highly recommend the "Nuclear 101: How Nuclear Bombs Work" lectures by Matthew Bunn, a man heavily involved in nuclear arms control. His lectures are always highly entertaining, a real pleasure to watch. This is a clip from his lecture explaining the basics of thermonuclear warheads: https://youtu.be/YMuRpx4T2Rw https://youtu.be/YMuRpx4T2Rw And the full “Nuclear 101” lecture, in two parts: https://youtu.be/zVhQOhxb1Mc https://youtu.be/zVhQOhxb1Mc https://youtu.be/MnW7DxsJth0 https://youtu.be/MnW7DxsJth0
- sidewndr46 2y agoGiven the nature of nuclear weapons work, isn't anything presented by someone basically speculation? If he actually had the information he wouldn't be able to talk about it. He seems to have been involved at the government level in the storage and handling of weapons, not production of them.
- bitexploder 2y agoFun idea, there basically are no nuclear secrets. If you look long enough you can pretty much learn everything except some in the weeds details of the most modern nuclear warheads. My basic premise is all our “enemies” have this info by now and the complexity is actually in building them, not how they work or how to build them.
- xattt 2y agoYou might have the theory, you might have an understanding of the materials involved, but you’re missing the way they fit together. Assembly of the actual warhead could be aided by the OP diagram.
- Ginden 2y agoThis is merely an engineering problem. The hardest part of building nukes is acquiring weapon-grade enriched uranium, because it's controlled as hell and you will get bombed if you try to make your own. If you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on enriched uranium, paying salaries for team of engineers is the easy part.
- sidewndr46 2y agoNorth Korea, Pakistan, India, South Africa & likely Israel didn't get bombed due to their enrichment programs. There is a rumor that the USSR flirted with the idea of a pre-emptive strike on Mainland China to decapitate their nuclear program after the Sino-Soviet split. This did not happen obviously. Iran didn't get bombed, although that may just be because other forms of sabotage were available. Syria & Iraq on the other hand, yeah those got bombed. But it's not 100% a guarantee.
- bitexploder 2y agoStuxnet is still one of the wildest and best computer security stories out there.
- gorjusborg 2y agoWhich is probably why the U.S. looks out for uranium enrichment.
- chasil 2y agoI remember rumors of the theft of the W88 (mentioned in the parent article) during the Clinton presidency. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Report https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Report
- JohnMakin 2y agoThe fact nukes are hard to make aren't because of lack of knowledge, everyone knows how to make nuclear weapons - the issue is materials. Control of them is closely guarded and you tend to get disappeared or bombed if you make them yourself.
- nirav72 2y agoAnother one - fascinating video on how nuclear weapons locking systems work - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LPmAF2eNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LPmAF2eNA
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- mjevans 2y agoThat thing is supposed to be a logo? I'm reminded of CGP Gray's videos about flags. https://www.youtube.com/user/cgpgrey/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/cgpgrey/videos Like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4w6808wJcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4w6808wJcU About US state flags
- permo-w 2y agoa product logo, according to the title, although that may be a hint of editorialising from the author.
- PaulHoule 2y agoIt really is, it’s just much more graphically detailed than the usual product logo, probably because it was designed by nuclear weapon designers and not by professional graphic designers.
- dr-detroit 2y ago[dead]
- chefandy 2y agoI've done branding and identity design in the past, and got university training to do it. I've also worked as a developer and contributed a ton to FOSS projects. That an engineering organization thinks this is a product logo is entirely unsurprising. I'll bet their interfaces are really something. 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.
- pantulis 2y agoAnd why wouldn't they? As wikipedia states, SNL's mission includes "roughly 70 areas of activity, including nuclear deterrence, arms control, nonproliferation, hazardous waste disposal, and climate change."
- KeplerBoy 2y agoBecause such details are usually classified.
- mxfh 2y agoWhy someone is calling a chart/diagram a logo is the bigger mystery here. Mockups of things exist.
- ibeff 2y agoIt's not a diagram or mock-up, it's a direct representation of the real thing for computer simulations, similar to CAD. The dimensions and shape of the components are accurate. And the author is calling it a logo because the picture is used to represent and advertise the software.
- mxfh 2y agoIt's a product diagram on a presentation slide. Hopefully meant to be read on handouts or proceedings. A logo is the Sierra stylized text in the lower center. And the two others in the slide's footer. That Sandia might use, what was obviously intended as a diagram as a logo is a whole other thing but doesn't make it one. As long as all representation of that thing are that big and readable one can assume they were not used as logos.
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoThe author of the post claims that the warhead-like design "is literally the logo for this particular software framework." I can't verify this claim, but other Sandia frameworks (e.g. Sierra) use similar, equally overdesigned logos, so it's plausible.
- dredmorbius 2y ago<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41464358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41464358>
- ggm 2y agoThe entire half round with an inner core is surely half an explosively compressed primary. And, it's not a "logo" it's an infographic.
- dredmorbius 2y ago<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41464358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41464358>
- baybal2 2y ago[dead]
- sandos 2y agoMost likely is that it was deemed simplified enough not be an issue?
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe article addresses this by giving past examples of what “simplified enough” usually means. They’re much simpler.
- kingkongjaffa 2y agoBasically 0 CAD models you see with color coding and a mesh are actually accurate. In order to mesh the geometry for finite element analysis, the geometry virtually always needs to be defeatured. So the cross sectional CAD model here is a nice curiosity but basically useless for any reverse engineering purposes which is the key reason this stuff is kept secret.
- weinzierl 2y agoIn Germany we say "The DIN knows non color". DIN is our standardization organization and informally also how their documents are called. 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.
- kingkongjaffa 2y agoyeah there are several adaptive meshing techniques that use a mixture nowadays, imagine a bar with a hole bored through it, you might use quad meshes for the majority of the bar and then switch to tetrahedral meshes close to the bore hole to better model the curved geometry of the hole, and increase the node density in high stress concentration regions for a more accurate simulation.
- cherryteastain 2y agoMost 3D meshes will have a combination of hexahedral and tetrahedral elements anyway so the surface will be a combination of trangular and quadrilateral elements. Accuracy and convergence wise, it doesn't matter as much as polynomial order/time step size/element size.
- krisoft 2y ago> Renderers love triangles, FE solvers love boring quads. Btw even in Blender (which is pure visual rendering) people prefer quads. The common wisdom is that you should keep your topology quads with nice rectangle-ish aspect ratios if you can at all. It is not that triangles don't work, but they have a tendency to do visually unpleasant silly things when animated or sculpted or subdivided.
- closewith 2y agoFor everyone complaining that it's an infographic, not a logo, that's addressed in the article: > It’s literally the logo they use for this particular software package. Which seems to refer to the image of the re-entry vehicle in isolation from the infographic where the author originally found it.
- lupire 2y agoI don't see that claim supported in the article.
- buran77 2y agoI see a few commenters think the big chart/diagram in the first picture is the one being discussed. It is not, it's the rightmost slice ("Salinas") of that infographic which shows something like a warhead. It's shown blown up (pun intended) in the second picture of the article.
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- HelloNurse 2y agoThis thing could be a test object that doesn't work as an actual nuclear warhead but is similar enough to validate the discussed software: real-world crash tests match software simulations, and being accurate at simulating the dummy is a guarantee of being accurate at simulating classified weapon designs.
- eesmith 2y agoExcept as the author commented: > 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.
- lupusreal 2y agoThe author doesn't convincingly rule out the possibility that this is what it is. The other possible answers seem less plausible than it being a fake shape for software testing that happens to look fancier than past test shapes.
- eesmith 2y agoThe author wasn't trying to be convincing. "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!" My reply was to point out that the author discussed issues related to HelloNurse's suggestion.
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- gnfargbl 2y agoWhat is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? Pretty much every schematic of a Teller-Ulam type weapon -- a schematic which you will find in every introductory Nuclear Physics textbook -- shows a large cylinder with a spherical fission device at the top and a cylindrical fusion device at the bottom, plus some FOGBANK-type material of unconfirmed purpose. This image looks exactly like those schematics except that someone has imagined some little channels which look like they're intended to move energy from the primary to the secondary. Without detailed simulation and testing, a prospective weapons designer has no way of knowing whether those channels are representative of a real weapon, or just a superficially plausible hallucination. Overall this looks like someone asked a physics undergraduate to spend an hour imagining roughly how the well-known schematic might be fitted inside a real warhead case. It probably is exactly that. I can't imagine that showing it to the North Koreans advanced their nuclear programme by any more than fifteen minutes.
- defrost 2y ago> What is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? 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://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/about-me/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Wellerstein 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.
- gnfargbl 2y agoOK, but my question remains: what is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I did study nuclear physics to master's level. To my eye, there's nothing at all interesting about this image. It looks like informed speculation. Without any confirmation that this is a real weapons design (and I see no reason at all to believe it is) then it tells us absolutely nothing which hasn't been in the public domains for decades. > 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. That seems extremely unlikely to me. People who have held the appropriate clearance to verify whether this is or is not representative of a real weapon, do not tend to casually liaise with someone who has spent their career attempting to prise open that veil of secrecy. In fact, their own careers and liberty depend on not making such personal connections.
- joegibbs 2y agoSay if an adversary with a small nuclear program that hasn’t yet achieved a weapon got a hold of this, what kind of impact would that make?
- krisoft 2y agoThey would be in possession of an image. It is hard to understand what the author is hand-wringing about. It is not that nobody knows how these weapons are supposed to work. The real barrier is that to obtain the materials necessary you need a big-ish industrial base and if you do that that leaves signatures the relevant agencies can detect. 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.
- avar 2y agoThe "large industrial base" is required primarily to highly enrich uranium (or plutonium). A modern fusion bomb requires much less of that than the initial fission bombs. So I don't know how much a state actor could infer from an image like that, if we assume it's a schematic of an actual bomb. But it's just not true that someone in possession of detailed plans for how to construct a bomb isn't put into a much better position. They'll need a much smaller amount of fissionable material than they otherwise would with a cruder design.
- implements 2y ago> It is hard to understand what the author is hand-wringing about. The issue seems to be “Organisations party to classified information have to keep it secret regardless of whether it’s in the public domain”. As an academic historian the author is intrigued by the diagram - was it a mistake or was it authorised as a declassified representation? Either way, the consequences would be of interest. > It is not that nobody knows how these weapons are supposed to work. Optimally small, lightweight, robust, safe, reliable - all sorts of engineering short-cuts or novel techniques … you don’t want to give way accidental insights about the “hows” an enemy hasn’t thought of.
- renhanxue 2y ago
- lupusreal 2y agoProbably the guy who produced that part of the graphic was not told what a thermonuclear warhead actually looks like, because he didn't need to know, so he just whipped up his own idea of it from speculative public images. Knowing that the graphic came from somebody who didn't actually know anything, the censors didn't see the need to worry about it.
- relaxing 2y ago> Knowing that the graphic came from somebody who didn't actually know anything, the censors didn't see the need to worry about it. 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.
- renhanxue 2y ago> Knowing that the graphic came from somebody who didn't actually know anything, the censors didn't see the need to worry about it. 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).
- hbossy 2y agoI bet it's an inside joke, like Lenna.jpeg. Some outdated / test / dead-end, or otherwise harmless project put there as a wink to everyone involved in the industry. Maybe it's something an intern ruined on his first day and made entire lab work on for three weeks without realizing?
- taneq 2y agoThat was my first guess, that this picture is in the first page of image search results for "nuclear detonator" or whatever.
- QuadmasterXLII 2y agoSome people are confused why this could be a big deal. An analogy: on GitHub, if you echo a GitHub access token in an action’s log, it will be automatically censored. This post would be like noticing that someone’s action step is just named ghp_1ae27h… and that the name isn’t censored, and speculating on what that says about the token-censorship algorithm
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago[flagged]
- eszed 2y agoKey point: if you try it yourself, it will be in clear-text for you (you already know your password, so there's no issue), but everyone else will only see "***".
- sandworm101 2y agoNo. That is not a nuke. It is a mass simulator, specifically the electronic model of a mass simulator for a warhead. The various colors represent density of material. This would be used during aerodynamic simulations. That is why it is behind the graph about processors. This also explains the simple geometry as keeping things simple reduces the number of calculations. (Note that nuke warheads fall nose-first, the opposite of space capsules. So the dense material is packed in the nose, with the lighter stuff at the back.) The nearby disk looks like a represention of airflow around a falling warhead. They, like apollo, likely had an offset center of gravity that allowed them to stear by rotation, creating the asymetrical airflow shown on the disk. Falling in a spiral also probably frustrates interception. So that whole corner of the image is advertising Sandia's ability to do aerodynamic simulations.
- thedrbrian 2y agoNice try Sandia guy who forgot to redact this original picture.
- beerandt 2y agoThis was my line of thinking as well- 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.
- sandworm101 2y agoThe people doing the bomb, the physics package, would be very much removed from the weapon delivery people designing the actual warhead. The warhead people probably see no more detail than the mass numbers for the bomb. The warhead is essentially a very fast gliding aircraft with a literal kill switch.
- jiggawatts 2y agoReminds me of another design secret that leaked out because someone published a paper titled something like "X-ray crystallography of Lithium Deuteride under high pressure." People very quickly figured out that this was the source of the D-T fuel in fusion part of the bomb instead of cryogenic D-T liquid. Lithium Deuteride is nasty stuff, but it's a storable solid. When bombarded with neutrons from the fission primary, the Lithium splits and forms tritium, which then combines with the deuterium that was the other half of the crystal. The reason the usage was obvious (from the title alone!) is that very few chemists would care about any property of Lithium Hydride, which is dangerous to handle and has few practical uses. Lithium Deuteride is unheard of in analytical chemistry, and its crystallography under high pressure is totally uninteresting to anyone... except physicists working on atomic weapons.
- dwighttk 2y ago>That’s where I’ve ended up… Where did he end up? Intentional misinformation? It was definitely not clear but that was the last one he listed…
- niemandhier 2y agoPutting a weapon of mass destruction in a logo is tasteless. It’s like advertising with cans of mustard gas.
- krisoft 2y agoThey build/test/design weapons of mass destruction. What would you advertise a can of mustard gas if not with a can of mustard gas?
- ceejayoz 2y agoYou’ll love the NRO’s mission patches. https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/9/11895496/nro-spy-weird-mission-badges-octopus-satan https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/9/11895496/nro-spy-weird-mis...
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- avar 2y agoLet's assume the schematic depicts a genuine weapon, and that this was a massive redaction screw-up. I think the author is omitting the most likely explanation for why it wasn't redacted in future publications. It took from 2007 to 2024 for someone (him) to publicly notice this. If your job was to censor documents coming out of Sandia National Laboratories, and you screwed up this massively, what's your incentive to call attention to your screw-up? Better to just coast along, by the time you retire or move on to another job your ass is off the firing line. Ditto (but less so) if this was your co-worker or team mate, after all North Korea, Iran etc. already have access to the published document. What could anyone in your organization possibly gain from the ensuing shitstorm of admitting something like that? Has this person worked, well, pretty much anywhere, where people have a stronger incentive to cover their own ass and keep out of trouble than not? Or, that internal report and subsequent shitstorm did happen, but what do you do at that point? Make a big public fuss about it, and confirm to state actors that you accidentally published a genuine weapons design? No, you just keep cropping that picture a bit more, eventually phase it out, and hope it's forgotten. Maybe they'll just think it's a detailed mockup of a test article. If it wasn't for that meddling blogger... Edit: Also, I bet there's nobody involved in the day-to-day of redacting documents that's aware of what an actual weapons design looks like. That probably happens at another level of redaction. So once something like this slips by it's just glazed over as "ah, that's a bit detailed? But I guess it was approved already, as it's already published? Moving on.". Whereas a censor would have to know what an actual thermonuclear device looks like to think "Holy crap! Who the hell approved this?!". And even then they and the organization still need the incentive to raise a fuss about it.
- kridsdale3 2y agoMy experience working for huge orgs where success and failure is many nodes removed from individual actions makes me vote for this as the most likely scenario.
- jjk166 2y agoIt took until 2024 for the author to see the image, he noticed the screw up within moments of looking at it. Betting that no one is going to look at a logo before you change jobs is a pretty big gamble. 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.
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y agoIn the era of CDs/DVDs and according to year 2007 perspective, these types of infographic logos were quite common. Other than that, I'm not so sure about the particular design pointed out by the author.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoHeh. Ask my mother about the time that Sandia dropped an atomic bomb casing in the streets of Albuquerque. IIRC the story, this was still during WWII. They were testing the flight characteristics of the bomb casing. It did not contain a core. But it was still extremely classified. They had the test casing in the back of a truck, taking it from Sandia to Kirtland AFB. The truck got in an accident, the tailgate fell open, and the bomb casing fell out and went rolling around in the street.
- smiley1437 2y agoAny chance it's a legitimate screw up but they don't want to cause any Streisand effect?
- aidenn0 2y agoThat was my first thought too. If you screw up once, and then redact it in the future it's screaming "Hey everybody look here, there's classified information"
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- bee_rider 2y ago> This is the kind of thing that I think people assume the government labs might do, but in my experience, is pretty unusual and pretty unlikely. In general, you have to remember that the national laboratories are pretty, well, boring, when it comes to classified information. They want to be boring in this respect. They are not doing cloak-and-dagger stuff on the regular. They’re scientists and engineers for the most part. These are not James Bond-wannabes. The Sandia folks may be extra special, it is a pretty famous place. But engineers are people first of course, so lots of variation. And also, some are super serious of course, but there are hacker tendencies, playful tendencies. I bet if some intelligence agency folks wanted to, they could find some engineers out there who’d be receptive to this sort of thing. If it is a fake, known-stupid design, including it would be a funny prank that wastes the time of people that might want to nuke us, right?
- zubiaur 2y agoExtremely boring, bureaucratic and inefficient. With a few exceptions, I guess they are a way to have Phds on retainer.
- writeslowly 2y agoSomebody (probably a programmer or engineer) took the time to create all of that rad 3D word art, multicolored pie-chart, and the mountain logo, it's not hard to imagine they'd also throw in an eye-catching fake nuclear warhead for fun.
- csours 2y agoI visited Los Alamos earlier this year and talked to a retired materials scientist at the visitor center. He said that we have lots of books about the science and scientists that worked on the bomb during WWII, but very little mention of the engineering or engineers - and that's largely because it's extremely classified. The scientists can talk about most of their work because it's too broad to give any real aid to the enemy, but the engineers can't because they could REALLY speed up someone else's weapons program.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- BWStearns 2y agoTangentially: I wonder if the checker badge is a visual pun on the Arms and Influence cover. https://www.amazon.com/Arms-Influence-Preface-Afterword-Lectures-ebook/dp/B00FC655Q6 https://www.amazon.com/Arms-Influence-Preface-Afterword-Lect...
- _n_b_ 2y agoI would bet a few dollars that no Facility Security Officer (the name for people who manage security programs for defense contractor, despite sounding like a Sunday name for ‘guards’) in the entire NNSA complex has ever read Arms and Influence. That’s not quite their demographic profile.
- BWStearns 2y agoI'd take the other side of that bet. I've met some with pretty surprising backgrounds.
- karaterobot 2y agoOne thing he doesn't consider: Perhaps if they do not call it a nuclear warhead, or place it in the context of a larger drawing that tells you it's a warhead, having a sort of blobby, colorful model shape is considered plausibly nonsensical enough that it doesn't matter to the censors.
- simplicio 2y agoI've worked on (unrelated to nuclear stuff) computer simulation projects for the Navy where they had standard, notional models of the battleship which had the same sort of general properties you'd expect a battleship to have, but wasn't based on the design of any real battleship, so they could share them with researchers to develop their codes on without having to worry about revealing classified details. Wonder if this isn't something similar, if the DoE has some sort of "standardized notional warhead" design they can use to give to outside researchers without having to give every post-doc and grad-student a security clearance.
- walrus01 2y agoDo you actually mean battleship, or frigate, corvette, aircraft carrier, etc? Battleships in the sense of the Iowa class and similar haven't been a thing in the US Navy for a very long time, unless you were working on blast damage/effect simulations in the 1980s when Reagan reactivated them for a short time.
- Joking_Phantom 2y agoIt seems likely that theoretical work would still be done on battleships, after we stopped using them in the real world.
- squeaky-clean 2y agoThe author addresses this in the addendum after the article. Something like that already exists, and it isn't this. > 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.
- splonk 2y agoThe author is u/restricteddata on Reddit. This appears to be the thread that inspired this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1f85zpi/mk4a_mk5_dimensions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1f85zpi/mk4...
- felipelemos 2y ago> at someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does, instead of sleeping) After a couple of decades of internet I was expecting people to realize other timezones exists.
- diab0lic 2y agoThe full paragraph is as follows. > 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.
- tabtab 2y agoThat would have made a good Silicon Valley plot: they discover they accidentally put a trade secret in their logo, and have to jump through hoops to collect, hide, and delete the bad version without making competitors curious about their effort.
- declan_roberts 2y agoPowerpoint slides are such a hilarious opsec risk. When @Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA spying operation, all he did was download everybody's powerpoint presentations and send them to @andygreenwald.
- numpad0 2y agoIsn't one of best ways to verify this is to computationally "detonate" a similar model? If it's real, it should compress nuclear part, if it's not, it behaves like a HEAT warhead or whatever it is based on, or is that not the case?
- jjk166 2y agoIf you can simulate a nuclear weapon with that degree of accuracy, you already know what it is actually supposed to look like.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tripzilch 2y agoYou can hide your designs but we won't forget that your military threw thermonuclear weapons on civilian targets.