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US Forgets How To Make Trident Missiles
Hugh Pickens writes "The US and the UK are trying to refurbish the aging W76 warheads that tip Trident missiles to prolong their life and ensure they are safe and reliable but plans have been put on hold because US scientists have forgotten how to manufacture a mysterious but very hazardous component of the warhead codenamed Fogbank. 'NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency,' says the report by a US congressional committee. Fogbank is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of the thermonuclear bomb on the Trident Missile and US officials say that manufacturing Fogbank requires a solvent cleaning agent which is 'extremely flammable' and 'explosive,' and that the process involves dealing with 'toxic materials' hazardous to workers. 'This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them,' says John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, adding that 'perhaps the plans for making Fogbank were so secret that no copies were kept.' Thomas D'Agostino, administrator or the US National Nuclear Security Administration, told a congressional committee that the administration was spending 'a lot of money' trying to make 'Fogbank' at Y-12, but 'we're not out of the woods yet.'"
A similar problem exists with the SR-71's engines: some key documentation was destroyed in the interests of secrecy, which has greatly complicated maintenance work on the remaining aircraft.
Given the relative positions of "guns" and "butter" on ye olde national shopping list, you really don't want things to be bad enough that we can't afford guns. I agree that nukes are of limited relevance for a lot of issues more pressing than re-fighting the cold war in the paranoid imaginations of wrinkly old guys; but given the ability of tactically irrelevant weapons systems to continue to suck down massive funding for years or decades, I really don't want things to be so grim that they get cut; because that will mean than virtually everything else got the axe first.
The material in the design specification was essentially unobtanium. It couldn't be manufactured at all. Quietly, the manufacturing engineers developed a solution that almost met all of the design specifications, and this was an excellent compromise. Unfortunately, the design engineers couldn't be convinced to sign off on the design change because of quality procedure 15, and military qualification 7. However, the biggest reason the design engineers wouldn't sign off on the change was because of a supposedly critical but practically useless mandatory project requirement, like the missile must work when fired in -40 degree water from 20 feet under the polar ice shelf.
The manufacturing engineers decided that the "fire nuclear missile while under ice shelf function", probably wouldn't be used, so the modified material was actually just fine. They shipped the missiles, got paid, and everyone was happy. Until now, when someone tries to "fix" the original "fix".
This story has happened before and will happen again. Whenever you bump into a design that requires a part that "does not exist", watch out for the possibility that the part never did "exist". It could be that you are reading a "design" document, and not what manufacturing actually built. I've worked in manufacturing, and there are lots of stories about impossible to make designs that somehow got shipped.
If I had to choose whether to chance my family's safety or take out a family half a world away, would I do it? You bet I would. I value me and my family more than I value someone I have never seen nor met that wants to kill me.
Having worked at this facility in the '80's as an engineer, I can say definitively that this scenario is either misunderstood, or incorrectly reported, or deliberately obfuscated, or a lie, or postulated from sketchy evidence, but it is factually and wholly wrong.
Every project for every material or product, special or otherwise, was properly documented. These files would not be destroyed. (Note here that I'm assuming the files on "fogbank" were not lost in an accident or by malicious destruction.)
Now, has the practical and hands-on knowledge of the step-by-step, moment-by-moment synthesis reaction to make this material been lost? Perhaps in the course of 25 years it has. Lots of people have left the plant since then. But all the information, notations and observations necessary to reconstruct the process/project do exist, I assure you.
Great point. My experience is often when people we say "we lost the instructions..." they really mean:
1. We've scrapped the production line and its components so we do not have the physical capability to build x anymore, or
2. We have the instructions but since we last did this 25 years ago all the people who knew the little tricks to really make it work are long gone.
Another possibility is the files have been moved so many times over the years to make space for new material that nobody remembers where they are anymore.Probably locked up in some obscure SCIF, waiting to be moved again when the space is needed.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
NPR Has a story about how hard it was to recreate moon rover tires. In short, if it wasn't for an old engineer breaking regulations and keeping one in his closet at home, NASA would have had to start over from zero.
That "supposedly critical but practically useless mandatory project requirement" is the result of experience. Inexperienced engineers often make the mistake of assuming that if they can't understand why the requirement exists, it must be arbitrary.
Perhaps this is apocryphal, but during the Cold War, submarines would routinely get stuck under polar ice floes. Having a missile which would work when fired from underneath the polar ice was probably a very large concern for the system designers. Had the engineers pointed out the impossibility of this requirement, it is possible that military doctrine would have been changed to reflect the limitations of the technology. If you are correct about the difference between requirements, design, and actual manufacture, then the actions of these engineers (or perhaps bureaucrats) put the entire United States at risk of nuclear holocaust. Had the Soviets known this during the Cold War, they might have been more willing to risk a nuclear confrontation.
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Or, what seems to me most likely, this is a ploy to get approval for the modernization of nuclear weapons that defense and co. have been wanting. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120403555.html
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
Yes, because making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is such a challenge compared to developing a nuclear bomb.
Making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is pretty easy. Making it go a few extra thousand miles and still hit something you want to hit is quite hard.
As an example...North Korea has built a nuclear weapon (1940s technology) but not a reliable ICBM (late 50s/early 60s technology).
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I'm in Afghanistan right now.
Scorched earth? Not likely. All our efforts are are focussed on either rebuilding Afghan state capacity (police, fire, hospital, army, and government institutions) or on providing security for those rebuilding efforts.
The Afghans scorched their own earth during the civil war that followed the end of the Soviet occupation (and the Soviets gave them a good head start). Al Quaida and the Taliban occupied the law vacuum left by the collapse of the Afghan government.
The tough part about the Afghan mission is attempting to build reliable, non-corrupt government institutions in a land where almost nobody has any experience with a life in a place that is governed by rule of law. That's the major obstacle.
The Afghan mission is marked by its LACK of revenge-based policy. It is Marshall Plan 2 (although not as well funded or manned, to its detriment)
DG
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but look at after 9/11. Scorched fucking earth in Afghanistan.
As someone who spent 2 years not scorching the earth in Afghanistan, I can tell you you're incorrect. Perhaps you were just engaging in hyperbole, but for the most part what we do there is convince the locals to shoot at Taliban/al Qaeda (or at least rat them out to us), because there aren't enough of us to be everywhere. "Scorched earth" policy is something we haven't had the luxury of pursuing since WW2. There's a reason we're not getting our asses handed to us like the Russians did, and that's because our first choice is to make allies of the locals, rather than "conquering" them.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.