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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"
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
"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.
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.
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
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.
> 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:
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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.
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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
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
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.
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.
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....