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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?

#81

Post by relaxing »

lupusreal wrote: post #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.

> Knowing that the graphic came from somebody who didn't actually know anything, the censors didn't see the need to worry about it.

That’s not really true. If you manage to independently come up with classified info and release it to the public, you will get a visit from an agency.

Overall I think you’re correct.

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

#82

Post by JohnMakin »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #47
virgulino wrote: post #4

For anyone interested in the basics of nuclear weapons, I highly recommend the "Nuclear 101: How Nuclear Bombs Work" lectures by Matthew Bunn, a man heavily involved in nuclear arms control. His lectures are always highly entertaining, a real pleasure to watch. This is a clip from his lecture explaining the basics of thermonuclear warheads: https://youtu.be/YMuRpx4T2Rw And the full “Nuclear 101” lecture, in two parts…

Given the nature of nuclear weapons work, isn't anything presented by someone basically speculation? If he actually had the information he wouldn't be able to talk about it. He seems to have been involved at the government level in the storage and handling of weapons, not production of them.

The fact nukes are hard to make aren't because of lack of knowledge, everyone knows how to make nuclear weapons - the issue is materials. Control of them is closely guarded and you tend to get disappeared or bombed if you make them yourself.

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

#83

Post by USiBqidmOOkAqRb »

krisoft wrote: post #33
weinzierl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "quads only" rationalizations come off as quite cargo-culty.

Sure, edge rings won't have dead ends, and that's useful when adding edge loops to increase detail, but doesn't necessarily mean the topology is of high quality. Using only quads some cursed helix type topology can be constructed.

First thing subdivision will do on non-quads is ortho(1) operator, so a nice averaged vertex in the middle will be added. High side count cylinders will have weird saddles around caps, but that's due to subdivision being wrong tool for the task.

Quads can be abused to look bad too. If a mesh looks bad, it's a bad mesh. If animated mesh looks bad, it's bad rigging and skinning. Knowing "this one industry secret" won't fix those.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_polyhedron_notation#Ori...

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

#84

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

>> ,I'm sure we would've had terrorist attacks with nukes already. Or if terrorism was that big an issue

There are two problems with that statement. Let’s examine them

Firstly, does majority of terrorists want to nuke NewYork? If you gave 9/11 bombers a 5 megaton warhead, would they use it? You have to remember that many of them imagine they have a just cause.

Second, imagine you are could make a nuke at home and were completely immoral, who would you sell it to?

There are many evil governments and organisations that could pay more and be better clients than terrorists.

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

#85

Post by lumost »

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…

Making the entire thing efficient enough to actually be delivered to a target is also another matter. This requires precise calculation of the geometries and very precise grades of plutonium, barrel pipe, and explosives. How do you even keep the gun type shapes from deforming in the barrel?

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

#86

Post by jerf »

bitexploder wrote: post #51
sidewndr46 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the nature of nuclear weapons work, isn't anything presented by someone basically speculation? If he actually had the information he wouldn't be able to talk about it. He seems to have been involved at the government level in the storage and handling of weapons, not production of them.

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.

The hard part has never been the design:

1964, Physics PhD who knew nothing about nuclear physics designs a bomb: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/24/usa.science

Physics junior in the mid-1970s designs a device good enough to impress Freeman Dyson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aristotle_Phillips#%22A-B...

As search engines continue their trend of considering your search term just a suggestion, I can't pull it up, but there's also a case where a high school physics class decided to try to design one and also came adequately close.

The hard thing that is actually the stopper is the enrichment of the relevant materials. The other hard part is getting the best possible yield; there's huge variances in what you get from the same amount of fuel depending on how well you can put it together before it blows itself apart, but that's not a stopper for a terrorist group. Getting to Hiroshima levels is apparently not that difficult, as evidence by the fact it was done so many decades ago.

Delivery is another major challenge, but I'll consider that separate from the task of creating one at all.

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

#87

Post by proto-n »

gnfargbl wrote: post #43
SiempreViernes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. And as you'll know, since we both read the article, the author mentions what I believe to be the correct conclusion: > The “obvious” answer, if my above assertions are true, is that it must not actually represent a thermonuclear secondary. [...] It could be some kind of pre-approved “unclassified shape” which is used for diagnostics and model verification, for example. There are other examples of this kind of th…

He later finds basically the same object with the caption "The multiple components of a nuclear weapon body are highlighted in this intentionally simplified mesh" from another publication of Sandia, making that theory kind of unlikely

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

#88

Post by qchris »

bitexploder wrote: post #51
sidewndr46 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the nature of nuclear weapons work, isn't anything presented by someone basically speculation? If he actually had the information he wouldn't be able to talk about it. He seems to have been involved at the government level in the storage and handling of weapons, not production of them.

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.

This is concept is a neat one that I think differentiates the real world from many fantasy worlds. In the latter, many of the core problems are built around somebody having "forbidden" or "dark" knowledge, or the heroes needing to find just the right rare answer to some kind of fundamental problem that somebody wrote down but that was suppressed. Think Horcruxes in Harry Potter sort of a deal.

In the real world, we have classification, but by-and-large those are about very specific elements of very specific things (i.e. the exact shape/location of that secondary, not that the secondary exists or that Sandia does modeling of that sort of thing). No one's really the gatekeeper of knowledge of things like nuclear engineering or biological gain-of-function. There's not really a litmus test for someone to attend to a microbiology graduate program or take a chemistry class that would enable them to develop synthetic drugs.

Same thing with martial arts; no one's hiding some secret martial technique. A BJJ purple belt will, in a fistfight, toy with just about anyone else on the planet not trained in jiujitsu like they're a toddler. And you can just, like, walk into many strip malls across the North America, pay your $200/mo, and a few years later of consistently showing up, you're there. No secret death touch or spiritual clarity needed.

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

#90

Post by dr-detroit »

PaulHoule wrote: post #65
permo-w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It really is, it’s just much more graphically detailed than the usual product logo, probably because it was designed by nuclear weapon designers and not by professional graphic designers.

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