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.'"

Comments

"turn the other cheek" is not good politics

[circletimessquare]

politics is about power. unanswered challenges to your power are signs of weakness. this is on a public, national and international level. perception of weakness leads to actual weakness

on a personal level, say, you were punched in a bar, or mugged on the street, "turn the other cheek" is a superior philosophy. and not just because its folksy and feel good. but because its a genuinely superior approach to survival. responding to violence on a personal level with more violence usually just gets you killed eventually. responding to violence by just walking away, meanwhile, means you live to see a peaceful bar after the violent idiots kill each other

but that's not how things work on the international stage

international politics, despite weak allegories anyone can construct that don't really illuminate reality, is NOT like a fight in a bar. the problem is one of scale. lots of ideas that work in small venues of a few people don't scale up to large ones of struggles between nations of millions and complicated ideological ideas. we like to think of nations in terms of anthropomorphization: uncle sam versus comrade vladislav, mother russia versus father china. but real international struggles are not political cartoons. the flow of power and meaning to constituents of nations functions in a way completely unlike personal sleights in a neighborhood bar

"turn the other cheek" will never ever be the basis for an international policy for any large and powerful country that wants to stay large and powerful. it will work for small unimportant countries, countries whose international plicy don't matter or make any difference in the world, but it will never ever work for the likes of russia, or china, or the usa