There'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 so

There'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...