Any chance it's a legitimate screw up but they don't want to cause any Streisand effect?
Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
91–100 of 227 posts
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#92Earlier 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…
This is the same method published in the BBS/FTP distributed Jolly Rodger's Cookbook in the early 90s.
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
[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 "***".
hunter2
mods, please allow this chain to remain as original runescape "hacks" are about as hckrnws as any other content.
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#94Earlier 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 right type of plutonium in sufficient quantity is an order of magnitude harder than either of them - there is essentially no naturally occurring plutonium, it only comes as a side effect of neutron bombardment of specific isotopes of Uranium, which are already hard to seperate, and only under specific conditions are the right types of plutonium isotopes to be useful produced. And even then, it’s non trivial to seperate them.
The whole thing is a giant, high profile, and dirty mess.
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's a lot of detail about why the author thinks it is notable that Sandia released this image. There's very little about what it is in this image itself that the author finds interesting, save for some comment about a dip which could be intended to focus neutron flux from the primary to the secondary. I feel that's the kind of thing an appropriate undergraduate would imagine in a short amount of time.
I think you’re just looking for the surprise factor in the wrong place. The notability is all about Sandia’s public release criteria, which are pretty much orthogonal to whether or not the information is publicly known. I don’t think the author finds any particular detail interesting or new in and of itself, they even compare to other public illustrations that have the kind of detail you are talking about.
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#96This 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!
That radiation case couldn't focus water through coffee beans let alone X-rays onto a pusher.
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#97> This is the kind of thing that I think people assume the government labs might do, but in my experience, is pretty unusual and pretty unlikely. In general, you have to remember that the national laboratories are pretty, well, boring, when it comes to classified information. They want to be boring in this respect. They are not doing cloak-and-dagger stuff on the regular. They’re scientists and engineers for the most part. These are not James Bond-wannabes.
The Sandia folks may be extra special, it is a pretty famous place. But engineers are people first of course, so lots of variation. And also, some are super serious of course, but there are hacker tendencies, playful tendencies. I bet if some intelligence agency folks wanted to, they could find some engineers out there who’d be receptive to this sort of thing.
If it is a fake, known-stupid design, including it would be a funny prank that wastes the time of people that might want to nuke us, right?
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#98Say 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 bein…
> It is hard to understand what the author is hand-wringing about.
The issue seems to be “Organisations party to classified information have to keep it secret regardless of whether it’s in the public domain”.
As an academic historian the author is intrigued by the diagram - was it a mistake or was it authorised as a declassified representation? Either way, the consequences would be of interest.
> It is not that nobody knows how these weapons are supposed to work.
Optimally small, lightweight, robust, safe, reliable - all sorts of engineering short-cuts or novel techniques … you don’t want to give way accidental insights about the “hows” an enemy hasn’t thought of.
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#99[dead]
Re: Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
#100For everyone complaining that it's an infographic, not a logo, that's addressed in the article: > It’s literally the logo they use for this particular software package. Which seems to refer to the image of the re-entry vehicle in isolation from the infographic where the author originally found it.
I don't see that claim supported in the article.