Privatization Limiting Access To Information

Knutsi sends us to the Federation of American Scientists' blog Secrecy News for a post on how privatization can affect access to research material. The blog tells how a Harvard researcher on the history of nuclear secrecy was denied access that would have been granted in the past. Some followup is in the comments to this reposting of the FAS story. "Los Alamos National Laboratory will no longer permit historians and other researchers to have access to its archival records because Los Alamos National Security (LANS), the private contractor that now operates the Lab, says it has 'no policy in place' that would allow such access."

Comments

Is it really a problem though?

[Hal_Porter]

LANL does work on weapons. It seems like erring on the side of not giving out information will inconvenience some researchers but it might be a good thing for everyone else. And as someone pointed out, most of this information needed Q clearance even before privatization, which most researchers don't have, so the number of people inconvenienced is rather small.

Given the rumours of spies from China getting hold of US secrets like the design of the W88 warhead from LANL, maybe less access is a good thing. Seems to me that now that nuclear weapons tests are rare, it will be hard for other countries to make small warheads like this other than by copying an existing design. So stopping any information coming out of LANL is in the interest of the US.

Re:Is it really a problem though?

[Hal_Porter]

Did you read the link?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88

The calculations for a nonspherical primary are apparently orders of magnitude harder than for a spherical primary (a spherically symmetric simulation is one dimensional, while an axially symmetric simulation is two dimensional), which would likely be the reason they would be desirable for a country like the People's Republic of China (which already developed its own nuclear and thermonuclear weapons), especially since they were no longer conducting nuclear testing which would provide valuable design information.

This information wasn't in the public domain, and it requires both nuclear testing and computer simulations design warheads like this. It's worth pointing out that many other countries have spent a fortune not producing any viable warheads in sixty years. See for example North Korea's recent test. And I've read that other information about nuclear warheads have never been published openly.

But the idea of keeping this stuff secret is not that it's impossible for the bad guys to reverse engineer, it's that they need to spend time and money doing so. Actually, I suspect that the sort of disfunctional tyrannies that would be most dangerous with nuclear weapons would find any sort of large scale engineering project like this hard to run because they don't have a culture where subordinates can argue with their bosses without being punished. They tend to be very bad at engineering, and so it's possible that the current level of secrecy will delay them developing a viable nuclear weapons system until the US is able to shoot down ICBMs, or until their regimes change into something more democratic.

Even the USSR, which seems to have a had a far more healthy engineering culture than North Korea was essentially bankrupted trying to build weapons systems. And this was made much harder by COCOM regulations which stopped them buying crucial components from the West. I've actually met engineers from former East Germany who've confirmed how effective COCOM was.

Re:Which company researched the bomb?

[b0s0z0ku]

It's a good thing that governments have never ever researched nuclear weapons, otherwise they would have to post bomb making instructions on the internet.

Actually, the knowledge about how to make a nuke is pretty widespread. (Either fire two U-235 subcritical masses into one another at a high velocity to form a critical mass, or compress a hemisphere of fissile material with explosives.) It's making them small and efficient that's the secret now, but I don't think that terrorists/rogue states care much about that. Even a 'fizzle' yield in the middle of a major city would ruin a lot of people's days.

-b.

Re:If research is or was

[Stile 65]

Libertarians wouldn't call this privatization, either. This is still government-funded research done by government contractors. Libertarians would call this "corporate welfare."

This story is about 25 years old

[smchris]

It all dates back to Ronald Reagan and the push to "run universities like businesses". That's when the privatization of university results went wild.

By now, there should be a whole generation who has never thought of universities as anything else.

Re:Which company researched the bomb?

[Vitriol Angst]

Um, I'm sure it's a bit more work than that. Very few countries have ever been able to make a bomb.
Most all of the countries now developing weapons got the information from Pakistan... and they got it from us. Israel is also a well-known country for selling off US weapons secrets whenever we sell them something (the USSR I believe, got theirs from Israel).

And Homeland Security, actually DID put the plans for building nuclear weapons on it's web site -- until public outcry made them take it down.

You make it sound like banging two radioactive rocks together... yeah that's why everyone had to get their technology from someone else? I think only one other country besides the US ever independently developed nuclear weapons -- and even THAT is suspect. It's either been stolen, or proliferated on purpose.

The accusations of Iran having the bomb are ludicrous as well. They have (as far as anyone knows), 144 cyclotrons capable of concentrating plutonium. Running non-stop at peak performance, it would take 10 years for all of those cyclotrons working non-stop to make ONE atom bomb. It takes a lot of Uranium and a lot of work.

But the "small nuke" you mention is a very big deal right now. There were hundreds of breifcase nukes that went missing after the fall of the USSR. Many governments were concerned but it was believed that it wasn't too much of an issue, because the material necessary to arm it was about a pound of Polonium. An unstable, expensive, and hard to handle source of neutrinos that has a half-life of one year. After two years -- the briefcase nukes would disarm themselves. Despite what the News Agencies reported -- it isn't easy to acquire.

But when did we last hear about Polonium in the news? Oh yeah... the death of Lyshenko. Now I understand the press told us he was a reporter, critical of Putin .... but he was actually a weapons dealer, who was visited by a Mullah on his death bed to give him a martyrs funeral. Lyshenko was known as a go-between for the Russian/Israeli mafia (mostly in Ukraine working with separatists and Poland), and the Taliban.

NOW, you can start to worry.

You can find more detail of this on http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/