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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.
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.
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."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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....
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.
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.'"
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.
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.
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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.
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!
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."
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.
---
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%.
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. --
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.