Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

Also the mental models of proliferation are warped by secrecy. For instance, Iraqis got caught building Calutrons when the official line was to watch out for plutonium reprocessing and centrifuges... Despite the fact that the enriched uranium used for the first nuclear weapon used in war was produced with a Calutron!

Anyone responsible who thinks about this stuff, even if they don't have a security clearance, will look into the question of what the ethics are and what the legal consequences of secrecy laws are if you talk about certain things you think about. I had dinner with a nuclear scientist at a conference, for instance, who told me that he hadn't told anyone else about his concern that Np237 was the material that terrorists would most want to steal from a commercial reprocessing facility (if they knew what we knew) and I told him it was no problem because people from Los Alamos had published a paper with specifics on that a few years earlier.

I will leave it at that.

> OK, but my question remains: what is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image?

This is explained in the blog post: Publications generally avoid going anywhere near that level of detail, even if not representing actual/accurate data (to avoid the appearance of leaking anything sensitive even if it actually isn't - as the post explains).

I'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.

Not that the image itself is particularly useful or descriptive (it's not), but because the review office is rather quite conservative when deciding what to release, and anything suggestive of a real device is usually right out. In this case, the initial approval was probably an anomaly. I suspect that the reviewers looked at it that day and thought "eh, this is so far from reality that it's just not a big deal", and let it go. Any other day or set of reviewers and it probably would have been kicked back. It would be interesting to know the story around that approval, and what the fallout was, if any.

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).

> What is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image?

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.