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Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

wikileaks.org

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#71
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably a question of money. The testimony of the leaker is full of references to the Americans supposedly doing things better and more professionally. If true, that is surely a funding issue.

I have another conclusion. Here, for example: "they would deviate from set procedures because the procedures can be “long and winding.” He said “sometimes you just know that you can adjust a valve slightly and that would solve the problem. Following the procedures might take you down a long and winding path.” You might think that's no big deal, just an engineer using his engineering skills; if he was caught doing thi…

That's what I gathered from this. Now, I wouldn't put it past the UK to have some over-the-top rules and regulations (I work regularly with one of their largest agencies and it is a nightmare of a bureaucracy), but these seem like the complaints of a relatively low-ranking, non-technical person.

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#72
post #10

This part was just great: Just weeks after passing out of training I had a draft for HMS Victorious. My work mates started calling me a terrorist robot because I remembered everything and I have a Northern Ireland accent. This reputation would have undoubtedly made it difficult for me to gather information. I needed to create distance between them, and create a knew persona; I aimed for mixture of dumbness and eagern…

This is the scariest thing I've read in a while. Plutonium itself inside of nuclear warheads is unstable?

So is iron. At various temperatures iron changes its crystal structure from body-centered cubic to face-centered and back again to BCC and the amount of carbon that dissolves varies in each crystal structure, and you can hack the system by shock cooling to control the hardness of steel over a ridiculous range. That's a one line metallurgy degree, or "this chemistry fact resulted in the industrial revolution".

Water is also unstable, I can't keep track of how many non-hexagonal ice structures exist under some weird pressure and temp diagram. 12 or so, maybe. You put ice under a couple hundred MPa and it gets all funky.

On the topic of allotropes its depressing when you think everything out there has allotropes except thankfully maybe the nobel gasses like helium and then oh God there's liquid helium-II which isn't really an allotrope but its conceptually similar.

It seems that most of learning chemistry is learning nothing is stable and nothing is as it superficially seems. Plutonium is scary creepy but for better or worse its not unusual.

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another conclusion. Here, for example: "they would deviate from set procedures because the procedures can be “long and winding.” He said “sometimes you just know that you can adjust a valve slightly and that would solve the problem. Following the procedures might take you down a long and winding path.” You might think that's no big deal, just an engineer using his engineering skills; if he was caught doing thi…

That's what I gathered from this. Now, I wouldn't put it past the UK to have some over-the-top rules and regulations (I work regularly with one of their largest agencies and it is a nightmare of a bureaucracy), but these seem like the complaints of a relatively low-ranking, non-technical person.

Still, there are very interesting details in his text, one just needs enough patience to read through. Pity that he, wanted to "leak" fast, hasn't had somebody more capable of presenting his info. There are nice examples of how brittle the systems he worked on were, and the broader public surely does need a "disillusionment" about them.

He personally seems to have expected everything to function like in the movies, and it can be clearly seen how he is always surprised it isn't so, up to the point that they could have all died in the submarine just because of the fire that started due to the toilet paper!

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#74

We've run too quick, too far, trying to maintain systems with, in HN jargon, too much technical debt. There are not enough people with solid knowledge, not enough people with solid principles, not enough people willing, to maintain the systems people in power have insisted on building. Frankly it's a miracle and a true testament to human greatness and luck that things aren't as bad as they very well could be. Over th…

The alternative is we could send our best and brightest developers to write social media apps, online shopping & high frequency trading algos. :)

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#75
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're talking about Crimea then... well yeah, wasn't that going to happen anyway? Not sure why Trump gets the blame for things that already happened on Obama's watch.

Who's blaming Trump for Putin's invasion?

The people that usually push that line. They are mostly blaming Trump for Obama not stating WWIII. I dunno what they really expect.

There is a huge pile of problems anybody must settle before the US can demand Russia to free the Crimea (and one of them is actually establishing that Crimea wants to be freed).

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#76
post #10

This part was just great: Just weeks after passing out of training I had a draft for HMS Victorious. My work mates started calling me a terrorist robot because I remembered everything and I have a Northern Ireland accent. This reputation would have undoubtedly made it difficult for me to gather information. I needed to create distance between them, and create a knew persona; I aimed for mixture of dumbness and eagern…

This is the scariest thing I've read in a while. Plutonium itself inside of nuclear warheads is unstable?

There's a reason we don't keep them near population centers. They didn't choose North Dakota for the amazing winters.

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give sources for such a surprising statement? I mean I am aware of war plan red, but there are a great number of such plans for each major power, it doesn't mean that it is deemed in any way likely

Ok, so this is a sensitive subject for a variety of reasons, not the last of which the fact that Americans in particular have such a short attention span when it comes to history in general, and in geostrategy in particular. Nevertheless, you asked genuinely for response so I am giving it. To much of the US and even the UK, have this idea of the monarchy as vestigle forms of the state required only for ceremonious po…

I took too long so I stopped being able to edit,comment continued here:

In the end, 18 NVA divisions took over the south anyway. So, the postulation is that Sir Thompson, friend of Kissinger, did this on deliberatly, once again, to maintain the "balance of power".

Now, last but not least, we get to my war, the Global War on Terrorism. I have spent years since I got out trying to understand what happened there, so I will give you my terse summary. GWOT, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and including Africa in Libya, Somalia and Sudan, is all about the coming resource wars and prepositioning the, you guessed it, "balance of power". It wasn't about Saddam, (well, maybe a bit for ol Bushy Jr to go along with his masters Rumsfeld and Cheney), nor about Al Queda (which we had down to to control. It's a distinction that needs to be made to the leftists who just repeat the war for oil slogan. Who did we learn this from? You guessed it, the British.

It was the British who first invaded Baghdad in 1917 for the same reasons, to prevent a new arab-europe rail-line that would threaten their inherently naval trading supremecy. It was the British MI6 and London's WallStreet cronies who taught and formed the OSS/CIA. It was the British who helped the CIA conduct it's first coup in Iran in 53, and tought the vicious SAVAK/SAVAMA their tricks of the trade. The blowblack of that one is still something felt to this very day. It was the British who established the Baathist party in the first place and propped Saddam up!

It's hard to find the sources, but I highly suspect the common understanding of the UKUS relationship in the middle-east is much different than most realize, and that the US was pushed into war by Tony Blair, as the Chilcot report helps verify, for very similar reasons as all the above wars I mention. This includes the Iraq-Iran war in which the UK and US supplied weapons to Saddam, and the first gulf war.

I could go on and on, but this matter still needs more research on my part. Suffice it to say, that after reading enough Carroll Quigley, and of Cecil Rhodes, and the resulting myriad of round-table think tanks and their influence on US policy, I have come to the conclusion that the British monarchy and oligarchy has never forgiven the US for the original revolution, which Christopher Hitchens called "the only revolution with a fighting chance of survival and success", that they have been involved in entangling the US in war after war, and that it continues to seek, as Cecil Rhodes put it, "the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire".

Despite the pretend friendship on a superficial level, the disdain for Americans by the British elite was palpable to me on a recent visit, and I think the UKUS 47 agreement is the primary legislative method that will be used to usher in the totalitarian surveillance state in the US, and I highly suspect that the UK has been playing the US as a fall guy in the upcoming move to global governance. I half expect a new Neuremberg to pop up sooner or later.

That sir, is why I say, not only have we been near war multiple times in the past, but I would venture to say the British Empire, carefully disguised as the commonwealth, has never ceased being at economic and political war with the United States of America since its inception.

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#78

We've run too quick, too far, trying to maintain systems with, in HN jargon, too much technical debt. There are not enough people with solid knowledge, not enough people with solid principles, not enough people willing, to maintain the systems people in power have insisted on building. Frankly it's a miracle and a true testament to human greatness and luck that things aren't as bad as they very well could be. Over th…

>...not enough people willing, to maintain the systems people in power have insisted on building.

>We need to slow down, refactor what we can, rewrite what we cannot, the costs will be huge but the consequences of not doing it worse.

What's this "we" business? Are you volunteering for the job? There's not many people willing to work on such systems because there's obvious moral problems with them, and this means that the people you can get to work on them are probably not the most competent people around. I don't really see a solution for this. Either you force the "best and brightest" to leave Silicon Valley and go to someplace they don't want to live and work on WMDs that they are morally opposed to (doesn't sound like a recipe for quality work to me), or you have not-so-competent people working on them (also not a recipe for quality work). Maybe we should be rethinking our use of these things. Of course, that's not going to happen; our leaders insist on having them (and now want many more of them apparently), and the half of the population that voted for these leaders want them too (even though they're not smart enough to build them themselves).

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#79

The only reason to have nuclear weapons is a deterrent, but how do we modernize our nuclear systems for Safety and Security without escalating tensions?

I think it's a question of numbers: if you're building a bunch of new ones and keeping the old ones, your absolute number of deployed weapons goes up, and raises tensions. But if you build a bunch of new ones and simultaneous retire, and remove from service, a bunch of old ones, so that your deployed number is the same, that shouldn't raise tensions at all. It's hard to imagine how other nations could object to "we're replacing a bunch of old and possibly dangerous weapons with new ones that are much safer so we don't have to worry about having a horrible accident".

Re: Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so this is a sensitive subject for a variety of reasons, not the last of which the fact that Americans in particular have such a short attention span when it comes to history in general, and in geostrategy in particular. Nevertheless, you asked genuinely for response so I am giving it. To much of the US and even the UK, have this idea of the monarchy as vestigle forms of the state required only for ceremonious po…

I took too long so I stopped being able to edit,comment continued here: In the end, 18 NVA divisions took over the south anyway. So, the postulation is that Sir Thompson, friend of Kissinger, did this on deliberatly, once again, to maintain the "balance of power". Now, last but not least, we get to my war, the Global War on Terrorism. I have spent years since I got out trying to understand what happened there, so I w…

Thank you for taking the time to write this up. I agree with some of your points, especially on Churchill. I have generally found that the more I learn about what he actually did the less I like about him. I also suppose some of the earlier naval threat came from fears over some kind of a resurgence of the Anglo-Japanese alliance that was only a couple decades before around the time of ww2
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