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The Political Assault On Los Alamos National Laboratory
Harperdog writes "Hugh Gusterson has a great article on the troubles at Los Alamos over the last decade. Since the late 1990s, nuclear weapons scientists at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory have faced an unanticipated threat to their work, from politicians and administrators whose reforms and management policies—enacted in the name of national security and efficiency—have substantially undermined the lab's ability to function as an institution and to superintend the nuclear stockpile."
Are atomic weapons still needed ? i think they aren'T.
Perhaps we should ask Pakistan, China, and North Korea. And Iran. And India. Who else? Rogue Soviet sympathisers?
You could argue that maybe those nations wouldn't be so trigger-happy to get a nuke if they weren't constantly being threatened by the other guys who already have nukes. But yeah, genie, bottle, cat, bag, all that stuff. It would be nice if we could get a global agreement to settle all conflicts by a good Unreal Tournament Deathmatch, but it's not going to happen.
The US currently has enough warheads to destroy the world several hundred times over.
Quit with the massively overblown hyperbole. If what you were saying was true, and about 2000 warheads was enough to "destroy the world several hundred times over", the would would have been dead and gone a long time ago. Hiroshima would have taken out China and Siberia, too, and Trinity would have wiped out the US. Obviously, that didn't happen.
Nuclear weapons aren't magic "drop one and you wipe out and sterilize everything within a thousand miles" bombs. Yes, they're powerful--more so than people realize, in some ways--but in other ways, they aren't nearly as powerful as common "wisdom" would suggest.
Honestly, 2000 warheads is barely enough for a credible deterrent at all. Yes, the goal of a deterrent is to convince the other guy that you can bomb him back to the middle ages if he does something you don't like, but that takes a lot more than sprinkling five or six devices across the country and calling it done. A credible deterrent plan targets not population, but industrialization, transportation, and military facilities; you want to take out everything that makes it possible for him to fight a war or live in anything close to modern comfort. That takes a lot more than a handful of devices. Something like a railyard or airfield is probably going to take a few successful hits to truly render it unusable.
And then, of course, you can't just sit with the number you came up with there. Next, you have to consider redundancy; a good number of your warheads will fail to initiate, get shot down, or have a delivery failure (the rocket blows up, bomber aborts or is shot down, submarine doesn't get the message or is sunk, etc). And after that, you have to plan for maintenance; a very rough estimate is that a third of your stockpile will be out of service at any given time for maintenance (subs have to go into port for refits; bombers, missiles, and warheads themselves need maintenance and overhauls, etc.).
Remember, the goal isn't to try to be scary. Rather, the goal is to have enough to convince the other guy that he absolutely cannot win under any circumstance, so he shouldn't even think about it. We had that in the past. We might still have it. But we might not. And as long as politicians keep making cuts not based on what makes strategic sense, or with a coherent goal and policy in mind, but rather just trying to score political points by cutting back to some arbitrary number they pulled out of their ass, we make the risk of that happening greater.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
> face it, this stone's been turned, and it can't be turned back. even if we abandon nuclear weapons today,
> the knowledge exists to make them again (as it should - to ignore all of nuclear physics would be a bad idea).
The same is true for crossbows, but I don't see anyone rushing to equip armies with them. And before you say it's not the same thing, you need to go and examine the history of the crossbow, because it absolutely was the atomic bomb of its era. So basically I think this is a terrible argument.
The Bomb is an outdated weapon. The same is true of MBT's, heavy SP artillery and many other weapon systems. We're already at the point where a weapon that can't be carried on a Twin Huey is a useless weapon - so the M777 and Hummer-based drones are much, much more valuable than the Crusader and Abrams. And as that evolution continues, I suspect the war of the future is going to look more like stuxnet and less like The Bulge, and that evolution will continue. It will continue to be bloody, ever more so, but the way that damage will be delivered with be with precision, not area effects. The Bomb is the ultimate area effect weapon.
And that's assuming the war that the US next fights won't be on the balance sheet rather than in the skies. I believe all evidence suggests this is the real threat and that spending time and effort worrying about the atomic maginot line weakens the US's attempts to move into the future.
> nominal deterrent is needed as well. the USA's policy of consolidating, simplifying and idiot-proofing it's arsenal
It's not a bad idea, by any means. Cheap too.
There is the question of how many weapons are needed, and also the conversation about demasting them. It seems entirely reasonable to me that 50 strategic warheads kept in secure off-site storage (as opposed to mounted in missiles) is just as much a deterrent as 10000 warheads ready for 10 minute launch. And not just today, in the 1960s as well.
Removing them from the missile would be a clear message to the world that the US does not consider other people a threat to their existence (which is the case) as well as provide another level of escalation (or sabre rattling if you prefer) that doesn't exist now.
...these labs don't exist for the pleasure of working there. And nerds clearly still don't have a clue of how they are perceived by the rest of society.
In a real sense they do exist for the pleasure of working there; because the primary societal goals for which the labs were created can only be accomplished by people who are motivated by the pleasure of their work. The motivations of people like Oppenheimer, Feynman, Hasslacher, et al. are not generally money, they are motivated to understand nature, to work with similarly talented people, and to be recognized within that peer group for their work. Acknowledgment outside the peer group is largely unimportant, which means even if they spent the time to consider how they are perceived by the rest of society, they would not especially care. These are not easy people to manage towards goals other than their own, and it takes someone like Oppenheimer who was both in the peer group and an excellent manager to do so. It may also take an existential situation like was faced in WWII.
To give people an idea of just how sensitive this type of data is, this is basically what is already known publicly about making a lightweight fusion-boosted warhead that can be put on a rocket:
The ideal fissile material is Plutonium-239. It should contain less than 10% Pu-240 and ideally less than 2% Pu-240
This can be made in research reactors, using technology available in public literature.
The amount used in a simple implosion bomb is 4-6kg
It can be extracted from spent nuclear fuel by a solvent extraction process using the PUREX process ( which is again described in open litterature )
A 2-point explosion system can be made by using an air-gap lens. Detailed analysis of how such a lens could be shaped is available in open litterature.
Boosting the device is best done with an equal mixture of pressurized Deuterium and Tritium. About 5 grams total is needed.
Deuterium is readily available on the open market, and Tritium can be produced from lithium in a research reactor.
The plutonium can be stabilized in its delta phase by addition of about 3% gallium.
To prevent oxidation the plutonium can be gold plated.
Now, however:
Optimal yield is achieved when the deuterium-tritium reaction burns close to completion while the fissile material is still in a dense configuration. This means the fission chain reaction ought to start early enough to heat the hydrogen isotopes to ignition temperature quickly, but not too early as that may result in inefficient compression. The exact timing of the initiating neutron pulse is therefore very important, and depends on the precise characteristics of the bomb. Determining the optimal timing is believed very difficult without nuclear testing.
If the information he copied detailed the dimensions, composition and timing of the fission primary, then such information leaking to the public would essentially allow anybody that acquired weapons grade plutonium and tritium to create a highly compact nuclear warhead, small enough to fit on a rocket or easily hidden in a small space. The very first device to make use of this technology had a weight of about 40 pounds, and a yield similar to that of the Hiroshima bomb.
Speaking as the author/creator/owner/maintainer of the original LANL, The Real Story blog, http://parrot-farm.net/lanl-the-real-story/ [parrot-farm.net], and as a person who spent 20 years on staff at LANL, I can tell you that Hugh Gusterson's paper, if anything, understates the levels of incompetence, arrogance, and these days under its new corporate ownership, the *greed* demonstrated by the management of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The place had become nearly completely dysfunctional during the Nanos period, and is now simply treading water. The primary goal and business plan these days is to ensure that the annual award fee is received in it's entirety. Science has taken a back seat to making money for the LLC that now owns the contract for running the place.
--Doug Roberts LANL, Retired 2005