3 ms·
Reminds me of Fogbank, a material used in early US nuclear weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank "The material
by ortusdux 3y ago
Reminds me of Fogbank, a material used in early US nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
"The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified."
When it came time to refurbish the warheads, everyone in the know had long since retired and documentation was minimal, so it took over a decade and $100m+ to produce a usable batch.
- Sniffnoy 3y agoThere's an interesting little wrinkle here I read somewhere (sorry, I forget where) -- it's likely that it would not have been so expensive to merely produce something that would have worked in place of FOGBANK, or even that would have worked better than FOGBANK. The problem is that because testing of nuclear weapons is now banned (for good reason!), if they produced something different but better, there would have been no way to test it and confirm it. So they had to produce the same thing, yielding this result. Of course, that's just something I read somewhere and don't even remember where, so it's possible that's not accurate...