6 ms·

Questions for anyone who maybe knows answers: How likely is that there are nuclear weapons beyond listed in the article, something as Black projects? (https://e

Questions for anyone who maybe knows answers: How likely is that there are nuclear weapons beyond listed in the article, something as Black projects? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project) Also I am curious, when new nuclear weapons are developed, as testing is banned, how do scientist know what will be the effects/yields/outcomes? I mean theory is well known, but again in practice there are always some unexpected thing that can happen.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
For instance if someone attempt to build something as "quarksplosion" how would they know without testing? https://www.newsweek.com/subatomic-event-more-powerful-hydrogen-bomb-discovered-scaring-scientists-so-700779 https://www.newsweek.com/subatomic-event-more-powerful-hydro...
nabla9 5y ago
The article lists black projects. Like Israeli and South African nukes. Subcritical testing is allowed by CTBT. Computer simulations can do the rest.
azalemeth 5y ago
> Also I am curious, when new nuclear weapons are developed, as testing is banned, how do scientist know what will be the effects/yields/outcomes? I'm sure that the detailed answers to that are highly classified. My answer to this would be to observe three things: a) that there have been no publicly-disclosed substantially new designs in a really remarkably long time (remember -- we're talking about 1950s-1960s technology!); b) the underlying physics is well understood; and c) the amount of computing power available now is many orders of magnitude higher than in the 1940s. Practically, this means two things: i) the governing equations and scaling laws are relatively well-understood, and have been experimentally validated; ii) the parts of the simulation that require detailed numerical codes were developed quite a long time ago, and have also been experimentally validated -- this was literally one of the first ever applications of computing and I am sure that they all have detailed notes. Somewhere there is a tale about an old DEC machine being used as a timekeeping clock in an underground explosion by printing out its CPU timers over a high-speed serial link, and the experimenters noting when the signal stopped. The core "physics package" is something that has been highly optimised with literally trillions of $CURRENCY's worth of man-hours over the last half-century. The real difficulty -- as this website beautifully shows -- is not in understanding the undergraduate-level physics behind it; it's in getting the starting materials and actually making the thing work well. For that, we can all be grateful. Separately, another answer to the "how do you test things without testing" is by looking for analogues in terms of the insane pressures, temperatures and timescales that go on in these things. There's a reason that the US has NIF [1], the national ignition [laser] fusion facility, which helps both basic science and...not. Similar experiments include hydrodynamic blast testing [2] in which the behaviours of materials under extreme strain rates, driven by high explosives, are performed. The idea again is to validate the core simulation model of "what goes down" in the ps-ns-µs-ms that the explosion lasts, with its distinct phases. It's hard to stress how different materials are under high strain rates -- e.g. unreinforced concrete, often thought of as 'hard', performs poorly and plastically under similar conditions; very high velocity (gas-gun fired) projectiles can deform it very easily and penetrate for literally tens of meters. The challenge of design comes down to taking an assembly, and instantaneously doubling (or more) the density at its core, without jets, or spalling. All of these have analogous problems elsewhere in physics. Subcritical testing is allowed, as are explosions/detonations with other radioactive compounds, which can be followed by high-speed gamma-cameras to permit a determination of the degree of compression. Historically these were used a lot -- see the RaLa experiment [3], which was required to ascertain the behavior of converging shock waves (needed to achieve the spherical implosion necessary for compression of the plutonium pit) -- but instead of using plutonium, they used a radiotracer (Radioactive Lanthanum) in a sphere made of an inert material. > Questions for anyone who maybe knows answers: How likely is that there are nuclear weapons beyond listed in the article, something as Black projects? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project) I think this is unlikely, largely because there isn't a military need for them. Black projects have historically been for useful things. We're already at the point whereby the US or Russia alone could literally annihilate most humans on earth, with their existing, 1980s designs and materials. A lot of the focus -- I understand -- of this area of research is on detecting other nation's activities, and ensuring that "your" own stockpile is safe, and ready. MAD was mad, but it was effective. My gut feeling is that, if anything, US black projects are more likely to focus on asymmetric / information warfare, yet more low-observable aircraft or spacecraft, and, above all, intelligence gathering, cryptography, and similar. We have the doomsday machine. We showed that we could have the doomsday machine literally a lifetime ago. I hope above all that we never use it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility [2] https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/hydrodynamic.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/hydrodynamic.htm [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaLa_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaLa_Experiment
- baybal2 5y ago
  > I think this is unlikely, largely because there isn't a military need for them. Black projects have historically been for useful things. We're already at the point whereby the US or Russia alone could literally annihilate most humans on earth, with their existing, 1980s designs and materials. That never been the case, even at the peak arsenal levels. USSR, and USA bombing each other into the iron age? Yes, but not much more. The Norko h-bomb is a "black project." Israel's bomb is too. It's much harder to hide the fact of making plutonium, than what you are making with it. USA, and Russia both have enough plutonium to do quite a bit with it, but most likely smelting it into smaller, higher yield weapons. Tactical weapons were taken out from duty not because of them being "ineffective," or any humanism minded reasons, but because they were inefficient when it comes to plutonium use. Too much of it for "little" bang. I heard of one 152mm nuclear munition having enough plutonium for making 2-3 proper h-bombs. With START 2 being provisionally extended, but not followed by START 3, I see both Russia, and USA already preparing plans to upgrade their arsenals in 2026, the moment START 2 lapses.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    We have lost like a dozen nukes over the years - rhey are on ocean floor or in a glacier or totally unaccounted for. Tactical weapons are horrible, they are not kept safely in a secure silo, they are deployed, moved, they travel, they are near the front line and are more likely to start WW3. "That never been the case, even at the peak arsenal levels. USSR, and USA bombing each other into the iron age? Yes, but not much more." I was also surprised to learn that directly killing every person in a country with nukes is impossible. However, Nuclear Winter might finish off most or all survivors - models predict massive fires triggered by nuclear war, soot in the upper atmosphere leading to major temperature drops and widespread famine. Surviving that after all infrastructure and industry has been obliterated, and with widespread radioactive fallout... Suffice to say that I agree with OP's overall point, we have the doomsday machine.
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      > We have lost like a dozen nukes over the years - rhey are on ocean floor or in a glacier or totally unaccounted for. Tactical weapons are horrible, they are not kept safely in a secure silo, they are deployed, moved, they travel, they are near the front line and are more likely to start WW3. Makes me think that future proliferation of them is almost guaranteed, esp if a belligerents goals move away from trying to cause mass destruction in state-state way (doubly so as knowledge become more widespread, and cheaper to gather the materials for home synthesis), but effective deterrence in a individual trying to assert its sovereignty against any given nation/city state (like "hey, if you stop me, the dead-man switch on this mini thermo nuke will take out an area the size of an small/large airport and irradiate it for thousands of years")
eesmith 5y ago
What little I know is half-remembered bits from Richard Rhodes' books about the atomic and nuclear bomb development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rhodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rhodes Plus some lay reading. One of bits was that, before the US agreed to a test ban, American scientists ensured that it was possible to be confident that new warheads could be built, with a high confidence that they would work, even without additional testing. The people involved with this had experience drawn from the >1,000 nuclear detonations that had occurred and from designing multiple generations of warheads. There haven't been tests since 1992. "Stockpile Stewardship" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship - is how we ensure the reliability of the "Enduring Stockpile" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enduring_Stockpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enduring_Stockpile . New nuclear weapons, that is, the "physics package", aren't developed. See https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Allbombs.html https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Allbombs.html where the post-ban proposals say "Modifications of B-83 and B-61 bombs considered" and "Similar or the same as for the W-88". New ways of delivering them are developed. You don't need as big a boom if you can deliver the bomb to within a meter of the target, vs. the 100m of the Minuteman III, or develop methods like "Super-Fuze" which can "[boost] the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three", without changing the physics package. (Quote from https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/ https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni... and see also https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-super-fuze-the-big-upgrade-americas-nuclear-arsenal-22765 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-super-fuze-th... .)

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

For instance if someone attempt to build something as "quarksplosion" how would they know without testing? https://www.newsweek.com/subatomic-event-more-powerful-hydrogen-bomb-discovered-scaring-scientists-so-700779 https://www.newsweek.com/subatomic-event-more-powerful-hydro...

nabla9 5y ago

The article lists black projects. Like Israeli and South African nukes. Subcritical testing is allowed by CTBT. Computer simulations can do the rest.

azalemeth 5y ago

> Also I am curious, when new nuclear weapons are developed, as testing is banned, how do scientist know what will be the effects/yields/outcomes? I'm sure that the detailed answers to that are highly classified. My answer to this would be to observe three things: a) that there have been no publicly-disclosed substantially new designs in a really remarkably long time (remember -- we're talking about 1950s-1960s technology!); b) the underlying physics is well understood; and c) the amount of computing power available now is many orders of magnitude higher than in the 1940s. Practically, this means two things: i) the governing equations and scaling laws are relatively well-understood, and have been experimentally validated; ii) the parts of the simulation that require detailed numerical codes were developed quite a long time ago, and have also been experimentally validated -- this was literally one of the first ever applications of computing and I am sure that they all have detailed notes. Somewhere there is a tale about an old DEC machine being used as a timekeeping clock in an underground explosion by printing out its CPU timers over a high-speed serial link, and the experimenters noting when the signal stopped. The core "physics package" is something that has been highly optimised with literally trillions of $CURRENCY's worth of man-hours over the last half-century. The real difficulty -- as this website beautifully shows -- is not in understanding the undergraduate-level physics behind it; it's in getting the starting materials and actually making the thing work well. For that, we can all be grateful. Separately, another answer to the "how do you test things without testing" is by looking for analogues in terms of the insane pressures, temperatures and timescales that go on in these things. There's a reason that the US has NIF [1], the national ignition [laser] fusion facility, which helps both basic science and...not. Similar experiments include hydrodynamic blast testing [2] in which the behaviours of materials under extreme strain rates, driven by high explosives, are performed. The idea again is to validate the core simulation model of "what goes down" in the ps-ns-µs-ms that the explosion lasts, with its distinct phases. It's hard to stress how different materials are under high strain rates -- e.g. unreinforced concrete, often thought of as 'hard', performs poorly and plastically under similar conditions; very high velocity (gas-gun fired) projectiles can deform it very easily and penetrate for literally tens of meters. The challenge of design comes down to taking an assembly, and instantaneously doubling (or more) the density at its core, without jets, or spalling. All of these have analogous problems elsewhere in physics. Subcritical testing is allowed, as are explosions/detonations with other radioactive compounds, which can be followed by high-speed gamma-cameras to permit a determination of the degree of compression. Historically these were used a lot -- see the RaLa experiment [3], which was required to ascertain the behavior of converging shock waves (needed to achieve the spherical implosion necessary for compression of the plutonium pit) -- but instead of using plutonium, they used a radiotracer (Radioactive Lanthanum) in a sphere made of an inert material. > Questions for anyone who maybe knows answers: How likely is that there are nuclear weapons beyond listed in the article, something as Black projects? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project) I think this is unlikely, largely because there isn't a military need for them. Black projects have historically been for useful things. We're already at the point whereby the US or Russia alone could literally annihilate most humans on earth, with their existing, 1980s designs and materials. A lot of the focus -- I understand -- of this area of research is on detecting other nation's activities, and ensuring that "your" own stockpile is safe, and ready. MAD was mad, but it was effective. My gut feeling is that, if anything, US black projects are more likely to focus on asymmetric / information warfare, yet more low-observable aircraft or spacecraft, and, above all, intelligence gathering, cryptography, and similar. We have the doomsday machine. We showed that we could have the doomsday machine literally a lifetime ago. I hope above all that we never use it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility [2] https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/hydrodynamic.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/hydrodynamic.htm [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaLa_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaLa_Experiment

baybal2 5y ago
> I think this is unlikely, largely because there isn't a military need for them. Black projects have historically been for useful things. We're already at the point whereby the US or Russia alone could literally annihilate most humans on earth, with their existing, 1980s designs and materials. That never been the case, even at the peak arsenal levels. USSR, and USA bombing each other into the iron age? Yes, but not much more. The Norko h-bomb is a "black project." Israel's bomb is too. It's much harder to hide the fact of making plutonium, than what you are making with it. USA, and Russia both have enough plutonium to do quite a bit with it, but most likely smelting it into smaller, higher yield weapons. Tactical weapons were taken out from duty not because of them being "ineffective," or any humanism minded reasons, but because they were inefficient when it comes to plutonium use. Too much of it for "little" bang. I heard of one 152mm nuclear munition having enough plutonium for making 2-3 proper h-bombs. With START 2 being provisionally extended, but not followed by START 3, I see both Russia, and USA already preparing plans to upgrade their arsenals in 2026, the moment START 2 lapses.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  We have lost like a dozen nukes over the years - rhey are on ocean floor or in a glacier or totally unaccounted for. Tactical weapons are horrible, they are not kept safely in a secure silo, they are deployed, moved, they travel, they are near the front line and are more likely to start WW3. "That never been the case, even at the peak arsenal levels. USSR, and USA bombing each other into the iron age? Yes, but not much more." I was also surprised to learn that directly killing every person in a country with nukes is impossible. However, Nuclear Winter might finish off most or all survivors - models predict massive fires triggered by nuclear war, soot in the upper atmosphere leading to major temperature drops and widespread famine. Surviving that after all infrastructure and industry has been obliterated, and with widespread radioactive fallout... Suffice to say that I agree with OP's overall point, we have the doomsday machine.
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    > We have lost like a dozen nukes over the years - rhey are on ocean floor or in a glacier or totally unaccounted for. Tactical weapons are horrible, they are not kept safely in a secure silo, they are deployed, moved, they travel, they are near the front line and are more likely to start WW3. Makes me think that future proliferation of them is almost guaranteed, esp if a belligerents goals move away from trying to cause mass destruction in state-state way (doubly so as knowledge become more widespread, and cheaper to gather the materials for home synthesis), but effective deterrence in a individual trying to assert its sovereignty against any given nation/city state (like "hey, if you stop me, the dead-man switch on this mini thermo nuke will take out an area the size of an small/large airport and irradiate it for thousands of years")

eesmith 5y ago

What little I know is half-remembered bits from Richard Rhodes' books about the atomic and nuclear bomb development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rhodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rhodes Plus some lay reading. One of bits was that, before the US agreed to a test ban, American scientists ensured that it was possible to be confident that new warheads could be built, with a high confidence that they would work, even without additional testing. The people involved with this had experience drawn from the >1,000 nuclear detonations that had occurred and from designing multiple generations of warheads. There haven't been tests since 1992. "Stockpile Stewardship" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship - is how we ensure the reliability of the "Enduring Stockpile" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enduring_Stockpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enduring_Stockpile . New nuclear weapons, that is, the "physics package", aren't developed. See https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Allbombs.html https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Allbombs.html where the post-ban proposals say "Modifications of B-83 and B-61 bombs considered" and "Similar or the same as for the W-88". New ways of delivering them are developed. You don't need as big a boom if you can deliver the bomb to within a meter of the target, vs. the 100m of the Minuteman III, or develop methods like "Super-Fuze" which can "[boost] the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three", without changing the physics package. (Quote from https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/ https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni... and see also https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-super-fuze-the-big-upgrade-americas-nuclear-arsenal-22765 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-super-fuze-th... .)