161–170 of 227 posts
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speculation can be found on Wikipedia, perhaps accurate speculation, perhaps not. DoE contractors leaking details that confirm that speculation would indeed be a big deal, and might well save adversaries some real time and mistakes they’d otherwise make.
Or it's a psyop designed to make adversaries waste their time on a design that couldn't work.
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As nmadden noted there's a lot of detail in the article . > That seems extremely unlikely to me. None the less his nuclearsecrecy blog has been about for many many years and he's had a great deal of contact with people who have walked up to the line. It's not that uncommon for historians to have neither confirm nor deny but we can understand various silences relations with experts - even the OG Manhatten Project had…
> walked up to the line I'm not familiar with that idiom, and searching for it only gives me "Walk the line" - what does it mean?
Normally you would stay well away from said "line". Occasionally though someone may "walk" right up to the "line" but no further.
You can take it to mean that someone knows something secret but is carefully only talking about what isn't secret. The risk is that they might inadvertently reveal some information of what is beyond the line.
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> what is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? The level of detail, particularly the articulation of components/subsystems (primary, secondary, radiation case, interstage medium, tamper, fusion fuel, and a "sparkplug"). All according to the article. Per author, DoE has very strict guidelines on the depiction of nukes, and this image appears to violate those guidelines. The official depi…
Conclusion: that's a diagram of the obvious approach to building a thermonuclear device, which happens to be completely wrong for classified reasons, and if you pursue this design you're going to waste a decade before you figure out why.
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Low radiation steel is less needed because new steel is lower radiation. The atmospheric radiation level has dropped and steel making uses oxygen instead of air. Presumably there are uses that need old steel but they are probably smaller amounts.
> Low radiation steel is less needed because new steel is lower radiation. The atmospheric radiation level has dropped and steel making uses oxygen instead of air. > Presumably there are uses that need old steel but they are probably smaller amounts. This comment seems out of place? It would have made sense as a reply to a different comment thread in a different article a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.co…
No. 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 opp…
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> what is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? The level of detail, particularly the articulation of components/subsystems (primary, secondary, radiation case, interstage medium, tamper, fusion fuel, and a "sparkplug"). All according to the article. Per author, DoE has very strict guidelines on the depiction of nukes, and this image appears to violate those guidelines. The official depi…
Conclusion: that's a diagram of the obvious approach to building a thermonuclear device, which happens to be completely wrong for classified reasons, and if you pursue this design you're going to waste a decade before you figure out why.
If that was the case, an actor could go "this is obviously not the way to build this, lets move on" so in a way, you have sped up the development.
Just like saying, "We have 100,000 nukes" (a lie), everyone knows its a lie, which means we DO NOT have 100,000 nukes, as we wouldn't reveal the truth.
Enough of these little "misinformations" get released, the closer to the truth someone can get.
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You 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.
This 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.
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.
Let'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…
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Conclusion: that's a diagram of the obvious approach to building a thermonuclear device, which happens to be completely wrong for classified reasons, and if you pursue this design you're going to waste a decade before you figure out why.
I would ask you to elaborate, but I guess that'd be pointless