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RANT to follow, feel free to ignore: It feels like this story is being spun to raise "serious questions about the federal government's nuclear weapons manageme
by mbyrne 16y ago
RANT to follow, feel free to ignore:
It feels like this story is being spun to raise "serious questions about the federal government's nuclear weapons management" by Mother Jones and others, as well as to demean hackers.
From my three minutes of research, it looks like Fogbank is a material that is used in just three models of nuclear warheads, one of which, W76, is used on a the Ohio class of nuclear submarine. More to the point this is a story about refurbishing a device that is 20-30 years old. One weapon in the nuclear arsenal, the W76 nuclear warhead, is due to be refurbished and one component is not readily available since they shut the manufacturing plant down 21 years ago. And now that they tried to make the component again, they have run into some problems since no one has manufactured this stuff for 20+ years. The stuff is a nightmare to make--they had to evacuate the manufacturing facility three times in one year alone. (Has your office ever been evacuated three times in a year so you wouldn't DIE?)
This story angle(and its related links) is really about pundits who NEVER DID ANYTHING HARD mocking nuclear engineers who are trying to remanufacture something from the past, essentially from scratch.
"Tee hee, they're so dumb they forgot how to make the atom bomb." No. They are trying to make component to a discontinued 30-year-old nuclear warhead. I would love to have one of this guys fix my grandmother's 600lb. RCA Color TV, the one in her living room in the gigantic wooden furniture case. All they have to do is order a new cathode ray tube...oh wait...they don't make them anymore for that, now what? These critics are guys whose knowledge of electronics extends to (possibly) being able to use a light switch, and who have never MADE anything their entire lives that involves science, math, or reality. So what's my point? (Following is NOT directed at F. Pohl, I know nothing about him:) Maybe in Science Fiction Land, old crap is easy to fix, maybe your robot girlfriend could even do it for you---but in the real world, complex old junk and old codebases and anything that comes from intelligent, creative lifeforms does not get fixed by squirting stuff on it that you can get out of a toothpaste tube you can buy at Wal-mart. And frankly, my guess that if they spent $60-100 million dollars to create this new facility and make juicy new Fogbank, it is LESS than the cost would have been to keep the old facility open for 20-30 years until now. A top secret nuclear weapons manufacturing facility? What do you think that costs to run per year? (The Microsoft Ultra Top Secret Software licenses alone probably run into the millions per year.)
They won't reveal what Obama's last junket to India cost (and/or Bush before him), but if it was in the $5-10 million dollar per day range (that was the latest figure, I saw quoted, and verified by snopes) times 10 days and there goes the Fogbank budget. Pffft.
Hasn't Obama heard of Skype? Sheesh.
- pyre 16y ago> This story angle(and its related links) is really about pundits who > NEVER DID ANYTHING HARD mocking nuclear engineers who are trying to > remanufacture something from the past, essentially from scratch. Seems to me that the 'moral' of the story is that the government should have kept better records (of the design, and the manufacture process). So that they didn't have to start from scratch. $69M is the price tag for our lack of foresight/incompetance. The only other smaller moral is that we need to find a way for classified things to be found when they need to be found, rather than ending up in a bottomless pit because no one that has classification knows that it exists or how to find it.
- jws 16y agoThey learn that lesson periodically. At one point nearly 50% of the money they spent to have systems built by my people was spent on documentation no one ever read. ever.[1] If it only cost $70M to develop a process and replace them that is a bargain compared to the wasted documentation on the 9999[2] contemporary items that were never needed again. To be more concrete, the guys building the bigger sister system to ours probably blew through that $70M on write-only documentation every 12 months for years. [1] It piled up under desks until they asked us to "only" submit one paper copy because they didn't have enough desks at the program management office. We did eventually talk them down to a reasonable level of documentation, but it took years and the program level staff had to fight hard to get there. [2] I made this number up.
- mbyrne 16y agoActually, I am glad they didn't write a step-by-step "Making H Bombs for Dummies" guide like you suggest. Because NOTHING is ever kept secret if it can be passed along like papers or computer files. Witness the long and ongoing history of nuclear espionage breaches. Having the full recipe broken up and distributed in the brains of a trusted group of people is significantly more secure.
- pyre 16y agoThen they should at least have a plan for knowledge transfer rather than letting those people die/retire without passing on the knowledge, no?