Live data from Hacker News

Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

21–30 of 227 posts

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#21

Basically 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.

In 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.

yeah 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.

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#22
post #7

And 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."

Because such details are usually classified.

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#23

Basically 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.

In 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.

Most 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.

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#24

This 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.

Except 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.

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#25
post #6

That thing is supposed to be a logo? I'm reminded of CGP Gray's videos about flags. https://www.youtube.com/user/cgpgrey/videos Like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4w6808wJcU About US state flags

a product logo, according to the title, although that may be a hint of editorialising from the author.

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#26
What 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.

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#28
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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.

It'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 no…

The 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.

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#29
Probably 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.

Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

#30
I 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?
Post reply on HN