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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the missing ingredient in making Fogbank was Butter?
Torontoman
My European grandmother made a cake that could easily withstand the middle stages of a nuclear explosion.
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but... Why?
Is there any particular target you can think of that would be a viable candidate for a nuclear weapon strike? Cities would seem to be the most viable option, but we'd kill millions of innocents along with the bad guys. The brass once suggested that armies in open areas could be wiped out with a single nuke. However, no modern army is going to just line up and wait to be nuked short of a parade or show of force. (And definitely not in an unpopulated area.) Supercarriers and other large ocean-going vessels are good "soft" targets for nukes, but to what effect? Only the US floats supercarriers. With over a dozen in service plus hundreds of supporting vessels, all other navies are already outclassed.
In the end, our nuclear arsenal serves one purpose: deterrence. Whoever might want to lob nukes out way is aware that we have nukes of our own to lob back. And we WANT those nukes to be as eco-unfriendly as possible so that they won't do any stupid calculations like "we'll take out 20 million of their's in exchange for 1 million of ours." Instead, the calculation should be, "if we kill 20 million of their's, we die."
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And people wonder why I think the best way to secure peace is to get rid of the US...
you mother fucking idiot. There has been war for thousands of years and will continue to be as long as there are haves and have nots. You think erasing the flash in history that is the U.S. is gonna fix the world? those mother fuckers with glass parking lots have been throwing rocks a lot longer then we have been dropping bombs....
the best thing to do in response to a nuclear attack by a terrorist organization would be to STFU and fucking NOT retaliate.
I'm playing devils advocate in my post, I forgot to mention it. The problem is that trying to explain that to the POTUS and the joint chiefs would prove to be far more complex after millions of citizens were killed and millions more will die from the fallout.
I would love nothing more than to have world unity and nothing but love all around, but look at after 9/11. Scorched fucking earth in Afghanistan. The American people called for retaliation, and they got it. Look in Israel, a few of their people are killed in suicide bombings and they level city blocks in neighboring countries. It always seems like the political figures take Sean Connery's line from The Untouchables to heart:
He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
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.
And people wonder why I think the best way to secure peace is to get rid of the US...
You think the US is the only country that would respond in kind? Newsflash: Both the British and the French have reserved the right to respond to terror attacks with nuclear weapons. I suspect the Russians or Chinese would do so as well.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
We've been using them on countries for decades. Nuclear Deterrence. Perhaps you thought their intended use was to blow up?
Wouldn't it be ironic if the missing ingredient in making Fogbank was Butter?
Torontoman
Actually, there are several missing ingredients.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
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.'"
That's a logical, clearly reasoned and well thought out response to a hypothetical situation.
Which is why it will never be done.
9/11 was a far, FAR less traumatic event than a nuclear blast. And look at the fear-based trigger response that had, and the innocent people who took the brunt of that American fear response.
Governments are made of people. And people are stupid.
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.
Scorched fucking earth in Afghanistan. The American people called for retaliation, and they got it.
That's generally what happens when you provide logistical support and a base of operations to a terrorist organization that attacks a Great Power. You think Afghanistan would have come out better if Bin Ladin had murdered ~3,000 Chinese or Russians instead of ~3,000 Americans?
It always seems like the political figures take Sean Connery's line from The Untouchables to heart:
For better or worse that's how the world works. The only reason we don't see more of it is because nuclear weapons made total war too horrible to contemplate.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Yes, because making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is such a challenge compared to developing a nuclear bomb.
Actually, it is. The USA got nukes well over a decade before creating the first ICBM (1957). The first nuclear bombs were dropped from a plane. Developing the kind of aircraft that could get through the defences of the average nuclear power is even harder than developing an ICBM. You can't just load it into a conventional bomber and hope for the best. WW2-style bombing raids were only viable because the planes were cheap and it didn't matter if a load of them were shot down.
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because making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is such a challenge compared to developing a nuclear bomb.
Quite so. There are plenty of horrible, horrible non-nuclear weapons out there that can be delivered by ICBM that aren't nearly as difficult to develop. A good solid hit on downtown Washington and you've made as much as a political statement as a mushroom cloud. Nukes are only 'The Bomb' because of their emotional impact. Consider: people turned aircraft into weapons and now every airline passenger is treated like a criminal. Arguably more people have been effected by the World Trade Centre attacks than nuclear weapons. The sad truth is that you can kill people with a cricket bat if you try hard enough. Disposing of nukes, or guns or cricket bats won't stop violence. The only way to ensure lasting peace is through diplomacy and not engaging in international dipshittery.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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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
Not that the US did not create the situation, but more Iraqis killed other Iraqis than US soldiers killed anyone in the past 8 years.
At its heart, radical, fundamentalist Islam is a death cult.
Unless you have to overcome the counter measures and the chances that a few of your warheads may malfunction. We must calulate in a safety factor for annihlating the entire world. I think a factor of 5 to 10 (or maybe a little more) should be adequate.
They're not really clean. They're "clean" from the perspective that they kill all the people while leaving the buildings *mostly* intact. However, they greatly increase the amount of radioactivity in the area. All those buildings that are penetrated with neutron radiation become radioactive themselves. A significant "rest" period is required before the city can be inhabited again. (Which is arguably unwise anyway.)
Air-burst nukes are already relatively clean. Putting aside the fact that they mow over cities, the detonation event happening in mid-air leaves very little ground material in a highly radioactive state. Topsoil still should be replaced and drinking water checked for possible contamination, but the long term effects of an area that is properly cleaned up are usually fairly minimal.
It's the interim before cleanup that's the big deal. With plenty of short-term radiation to go around, the bombs do a pretty good job of turning any area into a hell-hole. Which is a far more deterring effect than turning a city into a ghost town.
Ground detonations are another matter altogether. Those are just about as nasty as you can get. The fallout does an extremely good job of making the area unlivable for a very long time. (As the US found out after it unhelpfully blasted dozens of islands into nothingness during nuclear testing.)
You still haven't answered the question: WHY? What possible use could such weapons be?
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Yee-haw!
Maybe you should visit your local pharmacist and ask him to give you something for redness around the neck area.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Governments are made of people. And people are stupid.
Best t-shirt slogan ever!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The Chinese and Russians are every bit as barbaric as Americans
What you call barbarism I call self-defense. You don't respond to a terrorist attack by filing a lawsuit -- you respond by killing and/or imprisoning those responsible.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." -George Orwell
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Or, you know, we could reprioritize the list. We might just decide that spending ten times more than any other nation on "guns" is too much, cut it down to, say, five times, spend some of the saving on "butter" and some on repaying the loans we started taking out back in the Reagan days to buy all those "guns", and tell the military-industrial complex to go on a fscking diet already.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Around some parts, the word "patriot" is synonymous with "racist". Some countries are actually proud of other things than just owning the most guns.
yea thats what the US is all about. we haven't contributed any technologies to the world, agriculture, charity. We all just sit at home cleaning our guns looking at our sisters funny. You sir sound like a racist that has America pinned.
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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Retaliation with nuclear weapons is more akin to telling the rape victim to wear a huge explosive belt and detonate it when a rapist strikes. Sure, you kill yourself and a potentially a bunch of bystanders, but at least you got the would-be rapist!
Remember, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Or dead, in this case.
"The origins of the group can be traced to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The United States viewed the conflict in Afghanistan, with the Afghan Marxists and allied Soviet troops on one side and the native Afghan mujahedeen on the other, as a blatant case of Soviet expansionism and aggression. The U.S. channelled funds through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency to the native Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviet occupation in a CIA program called Operation Cyclone."1
Cited, yo.
It's been a long time.
I think Iran is pumping up oil to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to melt the icecaps, releasing vast amounts of Dihydrogen Monoxide into the environment to kill scores of people and wreak economic havoc!
It's chemical warfare, plain and simple!
Greed is "the root of all evil", Money is just a tool.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
Perhaps you thought their intended use was to blow up?
Hmmm. In that case, they could just make the missiles out of cardboard and felt (like the Clangers) and nobody would be any the wiser.
iraqbodycount.org is based on news media reports and they themselves state that: "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence." How much undercounting that IBC does no one knows. So your figures are, as you say, bunk.
No offense, but stuff it. The US does not set out to kill as many people as possible.
I certainly hope not. But unfortunately what one "set out to do" isn't what counts. What counts is what actually happens, especially when it was a forseeable result of one's actions. "I didn't mean to" is okay for children, but not so good for adults.
91,060 - 99,433 is the complete total for civilian deaths in Iraq.
No, actually it's the number of documented deaths. That is, it's actually only a lower bound. The true number is certainly higher. No one knows how much higher. It would seem that there has been a studied effort by the governments involved not to determine the true number of men, women, and children killed.
But having a hundred thousand people die due to being killed by their own people (#1 cause) and accidental deaths during live fire
If these people would still have been alive had the US not acted, the US bears a responsibility. It might be true that this was the best of the available alternatives, but this case has not been seriously made at this point. "It's not our fault" is a pretty pathetic substitute.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Money isn't the root of all evil.
The expression is "love of money is the root of all evil."
That's assuming you believe in arbitrary black and white distinctions of morality.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
And people wonder why I think the best way to secure peace is to get rid of the US...
you mother fucking idiot. There has been war for thousands of years and will continue to be as long as there are...
...people. Not everyone abides by the rules of a convention. The kinds of people who will throw acid at little girls for going to school aren't the type of people who will sit around the breakfast table to discuss their problems over a croissant.
Sometimes the only solution is violence. Done neatly, and done correctly, it can permanently fix the problem.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." -George Orwell
Not to be pedantic (well, OK, it's thoroughly pedantic, but I'll point it out anyway), but there's no evidence that Orwell ever actually said this. I see this quote all the time, but it's never sourced or dated. More info here. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of pointing to wikiquote to debunk a quotation that's not sourced. I think the burden of proof is probably on the person attributing the quote, though.)
That said, misquote or not, I agree with the sentiment 100%.
Scorched fucking earth in Afghanistan. The American people called for retaliation, and they got it.
That's generally what happens when you provide logistical support and a base of operations to a terrorist organization that attacks a Great Power. You think Afghanistan would have come out better if Bin Ladin had murdered ~3,000 Chinese or Russians instead of ~3,000 Americans?
Bin Laden was in Afghanistan not because the Taleban invited him but because the CIA did. He was an American puppet for as long as it suited the US to stir up Muslim fundamentalists against communism. Then the US 'won the war against communism', and suddenly their CIA trained and CIA funded fundamentalist friends were looking around for a new target.
The Taleban were anything but nice people, of course - they were also CIA clients, after all - but you really cannot blame the people of Afghanistan for Bin Laden. He isn't Afghani, andthe Afghans didn't invite him.
It would be a bit like - oooh, I don't know - blaming Fidel Castro for Guantanamo.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
But how would nuking Iraq help secure oil supplies?
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
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
It's not so much "haves and have nots" but "I have and you can't have" that's the problem.
You're being unfair. No one (or nearly no one) is saying "you can't have", they're saying "this is mine, get your own". Wealth isn't a fixed pie to be divided up; it's something that's actively created by people's actions. Your wealth does not cause my poverty.
Money isn't the root of all evil; the desire to get money without earning it is. And that moral failing exists irrespective of the dominant economic system; it just expresses itself in different ways. Under capitalism, it's unfair and exploitative trading practices. Under socialism, it's welfare parasitism and government corruption. Different symptoms of the same disease.
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
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.
A flamebait moderation here is completely unfair. Violence is always around us, even when we pretend it's not. Pointing out that violence has legitimate uses is 'flamebait' to the hopelessly naive.
Let's say you call the police because someone has broken into your home and is attacking a family member. Let's make the ridiculous assumption that the police get there in time to make a difference.
What do you think they're going to do to stop the criminal? Ask him nicely? Maybe once. After that they're going to beat the hell out of him or kill him. And if the criminal DOES stop after being asked nicely, it will be only because he fears the coming violence.
The police are subcontracted violence, generally used to a legitimate end.
The parent poster made the point that violence is inherent in human society, and at best we can aim to have it wielded by the competent and just. This is not flamebait, this is the plain truth.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
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.
You should consider updating Wikipedia then. It currently says you have no idea what you're talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_the_United_Kingdom
You probably wouldn't see that red if you would take off those glasses. You should probably ask your doctor about that yellow around your midsection as well.
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