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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.'"
you can download the instruction from the Pirate Bay...
Excellent. Lets hope they can't make it and it means they have to get rid of them. Due to the current economic crisis, hopefully they can't afford to come up with a replacement.
In the current global climate, there's no point in having nuclear missiles. Those who could strike us are no longer interested and are now allies and those who are hostile and nuclear capable can't reach us.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Just get Gordon Ramsay to taste it. He'll tell you what's in it.
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.
Maybe we shouldn't be refurbishing these warheads, then? Who, precisely, will we be using them on?
I think this speaks of a larger problem in how the US government organizes itself. NASA had the same issue with some spaceship components because new people were not trained on how legacy systems were built. This issue is happening through many departments in the US government. The US government's extreme isolationism and disinformation for public forums allows them to be years ahead in technology that could help the general public, but means that the people can't benefit from the technology they fund until it has been independently discovered or rendered a relic by some new technology.
Mission Impossible, yes. James Bond, no.
How about you just decommission the warheads and missiles?
I mean Obama is all about curtailing military spending. Here's a good cut, right? /hippyliberalantiweaponcommentary
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
We need to get back the ol' American ingenuity and CAN-DO attitude! Remember we Uh-Mericans can do anything!
This is why it's important to document your code... or your warheads. Either or.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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.
My European grandmother made a cake that could easily withstand the middle stages of a nuclear explosion.
There is a serious side to this. The US hasn't actually built any nukes, stuck 'en on a rocket, fired them and had a successful BOOM for well over 40 years. That must be coming up for 2 generations of rocket / nuclear scientists and the third generation is now in training. That means that the "new guys" will learn from people who didn't have any practical experience and in turn learned from the people who actually *did it* nearly 50 years ago.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
is tar!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
"In the current global climate, there's no point in having nuclear missiles"
Right, because russia isn't being beligerant, Iran isn't keeping up its worn out Death to the USA rhetoric and hasn't just developed a ballistic missle capable of carrying nuclear missiles, various islamic groups arn't trying to obtain fissile material etc etc.
"and are now allies "
Really? Tell that to Georgia (the european country).
"who are hostile and nuclear capable can't reach us"
Yes, because making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is such a challenge compared to developing a nuclear bomb.
I may be large, but I'm not a building!
Sorry to point this out but it looks like it already has. Anyway , the russians have always been pretty smart when its come to high speed kit whether it be rocket motors or jet fighters. Look how far ahead of their time the Mig 25 foxbat and Mig 29 fulcrum were/are.
See, this is what happens when you don't continue to spend money on extremely advanced engineering projects: you lose the technology. Technology isn't just a textbook and some blueprints, it requires the experience and knowledge of scientists and engineers. It's a living thing: shelve it, and it dies.
It would be nice to think this would serve as an abject lesson to congresscritters, next time they think about cutting funding for something 'we don't need right now.' Although I'm cynical enough not to believe that.
Everything was better in the 80's. ... so why not missiles too?
Music, TV, Films.
So much so that this last decade has seen more remakes, covers sequels and reimaginings from that era than any other...
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
If you started doing mountains of blow again, you would think everything was great again.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
If the US keeps going the way it is we'll get to see them in action soon enough. It's believed that Iran got Sunburns via China a few years ago.
The fifth fleet is sitting off their coast in a what is basically a bay, otherwise known as being sitting ducks.
Nuclear weapons are not meant to "win". They are meant to ensure everyone loses. That in and of itself is the deterrent to using nuclear weapons.
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.
Perhaps we can buy back the plans from China? Thank Clinton for selling them most of our nuclear secrets.
He wasn't selling secrets, he was making backups!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think if you want to survive, as a nation, the best thing to do in response to a nuclear attack by a terrorist organization would be to STFU and fucking NOT retaliate.
This is the equivallent of telling a rape victim to lay back and enjoy it.
No.
On second thought, HELL NO.
You, sir/madam, are an imbecile.
As to the rest of the manure you're shoveling about the world being a better place if the US disappeared? Well, that really doesn't require an answer, now does it?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
And people wonder why I think the best way to secure peace is to get rid of the US...
I don't know why you think that, but the rest of the world doesn't exactly have a good track record in keeping the peace. Look at Europe before the US started stationing soldiers there in 1941 - two world wars. Or look at the parts of the world the US isn't interested in, such as Sub-Saharan Africa.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
And why the hell not?
Whether or not we refurbish these Trident missiles, whether or not we have a missile as fast as the Russkies' Moskit, we still have an order of magnitude more rockets, bombs, ships, planes, tanks, and other forms of military-industrial complex hardware than is needed to keep other countries from invading the U.S.
We could halve our military budget, and still be outspending the entire European Union. Our military spending is more than ten times that of the number two nation, China.
(BTW, you do realize that the site you link to re: the Moskit is 100% pure nutjob, right? In actual fact, the Moskit is dangerous but no superweapon.)
Screw the Trident missiles. Put those resources into building some solar cells or ground-source heat pumps or mass transit projects. Or training some doctors. Or fixing some sewer lines before they collapse.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
According to a friend that did a stint in high level strategy at NASA, that's not really an urban legend. When the project was shelved, the documents were more or less destroyed. Our Shuttle launch capacity isn't the same as then, and we really don't have the capacity to just "put err up." It's not that the blueprints are gone, one presumes that a certain level of that was archived, and reverse engineering the rest of the tech wouldn't be the issue, but you are right about the industrial base.
Also, changing environmental and work conditions would prevent just throwing together the Saturn V. Also, engineers of today don't have the same skill sets as back then. I never learned drafting, the core of engineering then. The archived records would presumably let skilled engineers recreate the project, but we don't have the same skills. Reorienting NASA for the Mars mission was a complete reorg of most of the agency, and a LOT of the work is recreating our technology from the space race with modern techniques and materials, because the old stuff doesn't exist.
Same reason you can't buy a 57 Chevy new... it's not that GM couldn't make a similar truck, but with modern environmental and CAFE standards, you couldn't recreate the classics, even if all the plans were there, and the guys working the lines are trained for robotic factories, you couldn't just recreate the 57 lines.
Really, the issue here is that if something else were substituted for "Fogbank," it would be untested in this application. For all of its secrecy, "Fogbank" is probably just some sort of polyurethane foam (my guess is that the "extremely flammable and explosive" solvent is an ether; polyols made from ethers can be combined with isocyanates to form polyurethanes). The foam is probably just as an insulator and space-filling material for the warhead components, and there are any number of products which would probably work just as well in the Trident warhead, but only one has been actually tested in a detonation of the device.
Without additional testing, the designers cannot be certain that any replacement foam they use would not affect the properties of the device, in particular the energy transfer from the fission component to the fusion component. If the designers knew how to make "Fogbank" again, they would have a direct like-for-like replacement. If they have to develop something new, they will probably spend a lot of time and money bombarding it with neutrons and X-rays to validate its properties.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Tell that to Georgia (the european country).
Couple of points, if you ever actually visited Georgia, you would have a hard time calling it a "Euopean country" with a straight face. It is a typical Southern Caucaus mountain territory, and the only wiff of Europe is what has been bought with bribe money from US and EU... As far as the Georgias "problems" they are self inflicted, THEY attacked Ossetia and tried to commit genocide and were thwarted. If you dig into the history of Georgias modern borders as they are today you will see that it is a country created by its native son, Stalin. Its borders were created through forced relocation of the native population of Ossetia, Abkhazia, etc.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
> non-nuclear weapons with megaton yields
No such thing. The largest thermobaric weapons have yields in the tens or at most hundreds of tons.
From Wikipedia:
How does nuking thousands of Japanese civilians un-nazi the world?
By the end of WWII the Japanese were ready to fight to the last Japanese. Not the last Japanese soldier, the last Japanese. The US was also ready to fight to the last Japanese. For example, they got so many purple hearts (the wounded soldier decoration) made, they still had supplied in 2000.
If it hadn't been for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese culture might have gone the way of the Sioux. A remnant would have survived, but only a remnant.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's got electrolytes.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
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.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
In my view, if even one of those thousands of civilians was against attacking the US, the bombing was not worth it.
So we should have invaded them instead? Take a look at what the Japanese civilians on Saipan did when confronted with defeat and tell me that less of them would have died if we had invaded the Japanese home islands.
But when you retaliate a sneak attack on a military base with an attack that causes more than 100x as many deaths, many of them civilians, then you've overstepped your right. That's a criminal act.
War isn't supposed to be pretty. When you mobilize the entire resources of your nation to fight said war then the entire resources of your nation become legitimate targets. Call it criminal all you want but we didn't start the war. We just ended it as quickly as possible.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
and those who are hostile and nuclear capable can't reach us.
...yet...
This is exactly why most of the world has an unshakeable conviction that Americans are adolescents. It seems that America has no identity at all if it isn't fighting the perennial "last war", whether it be against Russians, Muslims or others as yet unnamed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now there's an oxymoron.
NASA is also suffering the same issue with its latest rockets, in that everyone who knew anything about the Apollo missions has left, and they actually had to call in some old engineers to help. I really believe, at least for the space side of things we need to develop a Wiki where are space related technology can be documented. We could worry about some of this technology getting into the hand of a 'rogue nation', but from what I can tell these nations already have access to the technology, one way or another. What they don't necessarily have access to are the funds or the people capable of applying the knowledge.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
So you mean they were accurate ?
Idiot.
Fogbank is made from PEOPLE!!!
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
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
No, you should have negotiated more. Make a few small concessions - allowing the emperor to remain in power, perhaps.
When you mobilize the entire resources of your nation to fight said war then the entire resources of your nation become legitimate targets.
Bollocks; and, I suspect, only said at all because your nation never had its civilian towns bombed.
Call it criminal all you want but we didn't start the war. We just ended it as quickly as possible.
(The US contribution to the war, particularly if measured in terms of lives lost, is relatively small, and it irritates me when you try and claim all the credit, but leaving that aside) No, the quickest way to end it would've been to surrender. Even given that the war needed to be thought, do you really think Dresden/Kobe/Hirishima/Nagasaki shortened the war any? Did they save more lives than they cost? They didn't succeed in halting industrial production (in at least one case planes were being put together in fields, under canvas, the very next day); they seem to have been more about killing and demoralizing than war effectiveness.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think the war needed to be fought, and I understand that those at the time had been through years of hell and didn't have the benefit of our hindsight and rationality. But for the sake of trying to prevent it happening again, it needs to be said: the deliberate bombing of civilian populations that was done towards the end of the war (and it was largely the end of the war, the western front in Europe was fought relatively cleanly for most of the war, and the attacks on civilians in eastern europe and china (which, incidentally, don't for a moment think I don't condemn strongly; no major player in the war's hands are clean) were done by more conventional methods)was wrong, even in wartime, and should not be repeated.
I am trolling
I find it tough to believe that the foam in the W88 is really that different from the foam in the W76. I thought the goal of the foam was to just become completely ionized and become transparent to X-rays? How hard can that really be when a fission weapon is exploding a few feet away.
I imagine there might be some physical characteristics of the foam related to ballistic devices (can handle G's on launch, re-rentry, etc.) but that would be similar across all ballistic weapons.
Unless there is something they aren't telling us ;)
You can't just murder them over something as transient as a rape
on the contrary, you can respond with deadly force for pretty much any kind of physical assault--- and it's self defense, not murder.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
There is speculation that the foam itself is involved in compression of the secondary (through state change into a plasma). Though what you say is probably the actual case, that being x-ray compression of the secondary.
If its true though that this foam is so critical then it tosses a couple of questions up on what people have been speculating.
Kipling said it, and he has been badly paraphrased. Orwell wrote a piece on Kipling, and thought well of Kipling expressing this idea. Here is what Orwell said "He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." Orwell in general wasn't keen on Kipling. His article is a good read, though long for some. Kipling's poem that said it best is Tommy.
Absolute BS.
First... how did Bush get into office the second time? The Electoral College. So if someone stood up and voted against him.... in fact if a majority of the population stood up and voted against him it made no difference. He manipulated the system, and got the right votes to put him in office.
So, all those people who stood up and voted against... what are THEY supposed to do now, so you don't lob them into that guilty bucket? They tried. They attempted to use the system. They did what they could do without getting shot.
I am an adult, and I am in the US. I am innocent of any of the crimes of my government. If it was in my power to stop those crimes from happening, I would have done it. However it was NOT in my power to be able to stop my government from doing any and/or all of the things I found to be wrong and/or offensive. If I do anything more, I'll end up behind bars indefinitely under the Patriot Act.
Nothing that Obama does is going to make a difference for the better. As long as we attempt to work within the corrupt and broken system to fix it, we are going to fail. We proved once before that it took a bloody revolution to make the necessary changes. We proved that Revolution works. The country as it is, is not the country our founding fathers intended, in any way. We are in need of another revolution, to fix our current government.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
I'm not sure what type of anti-ship missile you're referring to, but aircraft carriers have computer-controlled mini-guns mounted to defend against air-to-surface missiles. I would assume the same could work for these battleships.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Um, no. Plain low-Z foams are well documented in a number of nuclear weapons - are perfectly straighforwards to make, use, and test. Fogbank's described properties pretty much only match an aerogel of some sort with suspended high-Z material, and extensive (non-public) analysis by a physicist with inertial confinement fusion experience indicates that Fogbank could be extremely critical to the operation of highly compact thermonuclear secondaries (the second, fusion implosion stage after the primary fission fires). Very thin radiation cases and energy buffered into the aerogel's high-Z constituent apparently allow you to effectively push the secondary without having a thick (heavy) radiation case to contain the primary's energy for much longer. There are a number of weapons that didn't have that level of compact secondary still in use - B61s, B83s, W62s, etc. However, a number of the very tight tolerances secondaries in use - W76, W87, W88, possibly W80 and the other B61 derivatives with stepped radiation cases, possibly W89 and RRW derivatives, probably don't work without the suspended high-Z aerogel material. Could we redesign them with thicker radiation cases instead? Sure. Add ... 20% perhaps to overall weight. Oh, and we'd have to withdraw from the nuclear test ban treaty and the threshold test ban treaty to test the redesigned weapons, because that redesign is NOT a minor issue with reliability, it's a fundamental physics/engineering change, even if the primary and secondary are the same. It's changing the dynamics of the energy capture from the primary and the timing and intensity of the energy pulse delivered to the secondary, in a radical manner. So, you need to test it.
Or we could go back to earlier, heavier designs, like the B61 and B83s. Except that all our current ICBM warheads appear to use Fogbank now. Oops. Error. Try again.
"I thought the goal of the foam was to just become completely ionized and become transparent to X-rays? How hard can that really be when a fission weapon is exploding a few feet away."
I assume pretty hard if you're trying to become a lens to *focus* those X-rays, and do it within nanoseconds while in the process of being destroyed.
"Unless there is something they aren't telling us ;)"
A nuclear power withholding detailed descriptions of how their mega-kill-bombs work? Unpossible.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
When you read some of the background material on this (http://www.banthebomb.org/newbombs/fogbank%20material.doc) you find:
Fogbank is like part of the "interstage" between the fission primary and the thermonuclear secondary. Design contraints for the W76 make the use of exotic aerogels such as Fogbank necessary. The need to recycle and refurbish the warheads past their design lifetime require use to deal these materials again and again.
Fogbank was likely only produced at one place the Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge TN.
Fogbank was produced at Building 9404-11 from the mid '70 to 1989. The Building 9404-11 was decomissioned and a new "Purification Facility" at building 9420-1 was finally constructed from 2003 until 2006.
The need to produce more Fogbank was likely found relative to the W76 warhead in 1996 to 1999 review when the life extension of the W76 was deemed the thing to do.
There are those who would like the production of a reliable replacement weapon (RRW) which would (or could) bypass the need for Fogbank.
The nuclear genie can't be put back in the bottle and these difficult decisions will continue for decades. The nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea and who knows where else will just continue the problems.
In contrast we don't operate Nike missle batteries anymore with acceptable US civilian casualty rates of 25% in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphi, Pittsburgh....