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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?

#71

Post by taneq »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #63
bitexploder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun idea, there basically are no nuclear secrets. If you look long enough you can pretty much learn everything except some in the weeds details of the most modern nuclear warheads. My basic premise is all our “enemies” have this info by now and the complexity is actually in building them, not how they work or how to build them.

There was once an article in a pop sci magazine 25 odd years ago about how to build a nuke in a house; basically a pipe / barrel from the attic to the basement, a concave bit of plutonium or the right kind of uranium in the basement encased in a good carrier like concrete, and a convex matching part at the top of the barrel. Explosives behind the top one, launch the one towards the other, ????, nuke. In theory. That…

[Cut to me in 1999 driving my old station wagon down to the local hardware store to pick up a few kilos of highly purified enriched uranium and some C4]

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

#72

Post by eszed »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #52
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #36

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

[flagged]

Key point: if you try it yourself, it will be in clear-text for you (you already know your password, so there's no issue), but everyone else will only see "***".

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

#73

Post by bryant »

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…

Find the paragraph that says "so this is awfully strange" and start there. It's a detailed analysis of the graphic in question, and what's "unusual" about it is that this graphic, with the detail identified by the author, has been published at all.

The next paragraph details what the author would have expected to be published by comparison.

And then figure 13.9 is what the DoD expects to see published at all.

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

#74

Post by avar »

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 call attention to your screw-up?

Better to just coast along, by the time you retire or move on to another job your ass is off the firing line.

Ditto (but less so) if this was your co-worker or team mate, after all North Korea, Iran etc. already have access to the published document.

What could anyone in your organization possibly gain from the ensuing shitstorm of admitting something like that?

Has this person worked, well, pretty much anywhere, where people have a stronger incentive to cover their own ass and keep out of trouble than not?

Or, that internal report and subsequent shitstorm did happen, but what do you do at that point? Make a big public fuss about it, and confirm to state actors that you accidentally published a genuine weapons design?

No, you just keep cropping that picture a bit more, eventually phase it out, and hope it's forgotten. Maybe they'll just think it's a detailed mockup of a test article. If it wasn't for that meddling blogger...

Edit: Also, I bet there's nobody involved in the day-to-day of redacting documents that's aware of what an actual weapons design looks like. That probably happens at another level of redaction.

So once something like this slips by it's just glazed over as "ah, that's a bit detailed? But I guess it was approved already, as it's already published? Moving on.".

Whereas a censor would have to know what an actual thermonuclear device looks like to think "Holy crap! Who the hell approved this?!". And even then they and the organization still need the incentive to raise a fuss about it.

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

#76

Post by taneq »

hbossy wrote: post #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?

That was my first guess, that this picture is in the first page of image search results for "nuclear detonator" or whatever.

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

#77

Post by AnimalMuppet »

cannonpr wrote: post #66
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was once an article in a pop sci magazine 25 odd years ago about how to build a nuke in a house; basically a pipe / barrel from the attic to the basement, a concave bit of plutonium or the right kind of uranium in the basement encased in a good carrier like concrete, and a convex matching part at the top of the barrel. Explosives behind the top one, launch the one towards the other, ????, nuke. In theory. That…

Casting, machining or welding plutonium into the right shapes and purities without killing your self, or some of the other exotic metals, without killing your self or making your neighbours sick in a sub 1-3 week horizon is incredibly challenging. The exact geometries you need to achieve aren’t easily available either neither is measuring is you achieved them without again killing your self. Getting a dirty fizzle is…

Getting the plutonium, in sufficient quantities, is also non-trivial.

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

#78

Post by Ginden »

xattt wrote: post #53
bitexploder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun idea, there basically are no nuclear secrets. If you look long enough you can pretty much learn everything except some in the weeds details of the most modern nuclear warheads. My basic premise is all our “enemies” have this info by now and the complexity is actually in building them, not how they work or how to build them.

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.

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

#79

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Heh. Ask my mother about the time that Sandia dropped an atomic bomb casing in the streets of Albuquerque.

IIRC the story, this was still during WWII. They were testing the flight characteristics of the bomb casing. It did not contain a core. But it was still extremely classified. They had the test casing in the back of a truck, taking it from Sandia to Kirtland AFB. The truck got in an accident, the tailgate fell open, and the bomb casing fell out and went rolling around in the street.

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

#80

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

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…

I’m sorry but all I can think of reading your comment is “but why male models?”.
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