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Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

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

#31

Post by krisoft »

joegibbs wrote: post #27

Say 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?

They 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.

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

#32

Post by defrost »

gnfargbl wrote: post #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 tho…

> 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://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.

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

#33

Post by krisoft »

weinzierl wrote: post #17
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #12

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.

> 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.

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

#34

Post by lupusreal »

eesmith wrote: post #24
HelloNurse wrote: post #19

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” seconda…

The 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.

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

#35

Post by cm2187 »

HelloNurse wrote: post #19

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.

No this is an espresso machine!

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

#36

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

Some 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

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

#37

Post by SiempreViernes »

gnfargbl wrote: post #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 tho…

The unusual thing, as stated repeatedly throughout the article, is that this is published by people who are under one of the strictest censorship systems in the world, a system that explicitly exist to prevent the publication exactly this sort of thing.

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

#39

Post by gnfargbl »

defrost wrote: post #32
gnfargbl wrote: post #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 tho…

> 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…

OK, 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.

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

#40

Post by nmadden »

gnfargbl wrote: post #39
defrost wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

OK, 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 n…

The article goes into a lot of detail about why the author thinks its unusual.
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