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What is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? Pretty much every schematic of a Teller-Ulam type weapon -- a schematic which you wi

What is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? Pretty much every schematic of a Teller-Ulam type weapon -- a schematic which you will find in every introductory Nuclear Physics textbook -- shows a large cylinder with a spherical fission device at the top and a cylindrical fusion device at the bottom, plus some FOGBANK-type material of unconfirmed purpose. This image looks exactly like those schematics except that someone has imagined some little channels which look like they're intended to move energy from the primary to the secondary. Without detailed simulation and testing, a prospective weapons designer has no way of knowing whether those channels are representative of a real weapon, or just a superficially plausible hallucination. Overall this looks like someone asked a physics undergraduate to spend an hour imagining roughly how the well-known schematic might be fitted inside a real warhead case. It probably is exactly that. I can't imagine that showing it to the North Koreans advanced their nuclear programme by any more than fifteen minutes.

defrost 2y ago
> What is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? In two decades of crawling through most of the declassified public nuclear material from the US nuclear weapons program, some exposure to classified material, and numerous hours of interviews with working and retired nuclear scientists he believes it's the single most detailed schematic of an actual specific type of warhead he's seen so far. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/about-me/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/about-me/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Wellerstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Wellerstein As he's blogging about this it's almost certain he has had real current working nuclear weapons experts from his contact list read the advances and not disagree. Correct or not, it's not a casual random thought from someone with no exposure to such diagrams.
- gnfargbl 2y ago
  OK, but my question remains: what is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I did study nuclear physics to master's level. To my eye, there's nothing at all interesting about this image. It looks like informed speculation. Without any confirmation that this is a real weapons design (and I see no reason at all to believe it is) then it tells us absolutely nothing which hasn't been in the public domains for decades. > As he's blogging about this it's almost certain he has had real current working nuclear weapons experts from his contact list read the advances and not disagree. That seems extremely unlikely to me. People who have held the appropriate clearance to verify whether this is or is not representative of a real weapon, do not tend to casually liaise with someone who has spent their career attempting to prise open that veil of secrecy. In fact, their own careers and liberty depend on not making such personal connections.
  - nmadden 2y ago
    The article goes into a lot of detail about why the author thinks its unusual.
  - defrost 2y ago
    As nmadden noted there's a lot of detail in the article . > That seems extremely unlikely to me. None the less his nuclearsecrecy blog has been about for many many years and he's had a great deal of contact with people who have walked up to the line. It's not that uncommon for historians to have neither confirm nor deny but we can understand various silences relations with experts - even the OG Manhatten Project had embedded historians and archivists who toed the line on handling and preserving materials and held long meetings on what to release | not release and when. There are even a few DoE employed HN users here who know their areas of expertise and comment right up to the point where they shut up (an often shut down | change accounts) - they don't say what they shouldn't but they have chatted until they don't anymore .. which is interesting in itself.
    - gnfargbl 2y ago
      There's a lot of detail about why the author thinks it is notable that Sandia released this image. There's very little about what it is in this image itself that the author finds interesting, save for some comment about a dip which could be intended to focus neutron flux from the primary to the secondary. I feel that's the kind of thing an appropriate undergraduate would imagine in a short amount of time.
      - rsfern 2y ago
        I think you’re just looking for the surprise factor in the wrong place. The notability is all about Sandia’s public release criteria, which are pretty much orthogonal to whether or not the information is publicly known. I don’t think the author finds any particular detail interesting or new in and of itself, they even compare to other public illustrations that have the kind of detail you are talking about.
        deleted 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
SiempreViernes 2y ago
The unusual thing, as stated repeatedly throughout the article, is that this is published by people who are under one of the strictest censorship systems in the world, a system that explicitly exist to prevent the publication exactly this sort of thing.
- gnfargbl 2y ago
  Yes. And as you'll know, since we both read the article, the author mentions what I believe to be the correct conclusion: > The “obvious” answer, if my above assertions are true, is that it must not actually represent a thermonuclear secondary. [...] It could be some kind of pre-approved “unclassified shape” which is used for diagnostics and model verification, for example. There are other examples of this kind of thing that the labs have used over time. That is entirely a possibility. However, he then goes on to immediately reject this "obvious" answer, because he thinks the well-known schematics of fission-fusion bombs give the appearance of a classified shape, and because he feels it is "provocative" for a government weapons lab to show a mock up of a well-known schematic in one of their publications. Those positions seem very weak to me.
  - proto-n 2y ago
    He later finds basically the same object with the caption "The multiple components of a nuclear weapon body are highlighted in this intentionally simplified mesh" from another publication of Sandia, making that theory kind of unlikely
    - krisoft 2y ago
      I don't understand that conclusion. That sentence, in my mind, makes that conclusion more likely. They say it is an intentionally simplified mesh. Which to me means it is not the real deal. So why does this sentence makes you think the theory is unlikely? (Or what is the specific part of the theory you think it makes it unlikely?) Genuinely curious.
      - proto-n 2y ago
mhh__ 2y ago
Photos of even a hint of the inside are rare enough that he has another article show (in effect) a hint of an imprint from an old photocopying mistake. I also doubt it's useful, but Ted Taylor could supposedly walk around a room full of nukes and guess based on the shape of the casing what was unique about a design
taneliv 2y ago
Even so, it would be very unusual if I understand the author correctly: > ... at least historically, the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor organizations have frowned on disinformation and misinformation for other very practical reasons. If you release a lie, you run the risk of someone noticing it is a lie, which can draw more attention to the reality. And even misinformation/inaccuracy can put “brackets” around the possibilities of truth. The goal of these organizations is to leave a total blank in the areas that they don’t want people to know about, and misinformation/disinformation/inaccuracy is something other than a total blank. In other words, the author expected to see a previously familiar schematic or nothing. This is clearly not nothing, and also not a familiar schematic, hence the surprise.
matthewmcg 2y ago
He says it a few paragraphs in: “To give a sense of how strange this is, here is the only “officially sanctioned” way to represent a multistage thermonuclear weapon, according to US Department of Energy guidance since the 1990s: Figure 13.9, “Unclassified Illustration of a Staged Weapon (Source: TCG-NAS-2, March 1997),” from the Nuclear Matters Handbook 2020 (Revised), published by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters. Two circles in a box, maybe inside of a reentry vehicle. That’s it. Nothing that gives any actual sense of size, location, materials, physicality.”
- gnfargbl 2y ago
  If the story here is that the US DoE is now implicitly confirming common public-domain knowledge that can be found immediately on Wikipedia then sure, that's a story of minor interest. That story is nothing like the title of the blog, though!
  - lazide 2y ago
    speculation can be found on Wikipedia, perhaps accurate speculation, perhaps not. DoE contractors leaking details that confirm that speculation would indeed be a big deal, and might well save adversaries some real time and mistakes they’d otherwise make.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Or it's a psyop designed to make adversaries waste their time on a design that couldn't work.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Spooks man, goddamn spooks!
      - why_only_15 2y ago
        In the post he mentions why he thinks this is unlikely and is not a thing the US has done previously.
bryant 2y ago
Find the paragraph that says "so this is awfully strange" and start there. It's a detailed analysis of the graphic in question, and what's "unusual" about it is that this graphic, with the detail identified by the author, has been published at all. The next paragraph details what the author would have expected to be published by comparison. And then figure 13.9 is what the DoD expects to see published at all.
thadt 2y ago
Not that the image itself is particularly useful or descriptive (it's not), but because the review office is rather quite conservative when deciding what to release, and anything suggestive of a real device is usually right out. In this case, the initial approval was probably an anomaly. I suspect that the reviewers looked at it that day and thought "eh, this is so far from reality that it's just not a big deal", and let it go. Any other day or set of reviewers and it probably would have been kicked back. It would be interesting to know the story around that approval, and what the fallout was, if any. Any further use isn't very surprising. Once it is approved and in the wild, re-using it is not really a problem (especially if being run through the same office for approval again).
tivert 2y ago
> What is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? Read the article and look at the "officially sanctioned" diagram. This looks like the tl;dr of what he things about this: > Anyway, I’m just surprised the DOE would release any image that gave really any implied graphical structure of a thermonuclear secondary, even if it is clearly schematic and meant to be only somewhat representative. It’s more than they usually allow! This linked post of his about an earlier redaction mistake also makes it clear (https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2021/05/17/how-not-to-redact-a-warhead/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2021/05/17/how-not-to-redact...): > ...but we’re given a rare glimpse inside of modern thermonuclear warheads. Now, there isn’t a whole lot of information that one can make out from these images. The main bit of “data” are the roughly “peanut-shaped” warheads, which goes along with what has been discussed in the open literature for decades about how these sorts of highly-efficient warheads are designed. But the Department of Energy doesn’t like to confirm such accounts, and certainly has never before let us glimpse anything quite as provocative about these warheads. The traditional bomb silhouettes for these warheads are just the dunce-cap re-entry vehicles, not the warheads inside of them.
ianburrell 2y ago
Low radiation steel is less needed because new steel is lower radiation. The atmospheric radiation level has dropped and steel making uses oxygen instead of air. Presumably there are uses that need old steel but they are probably smaller amounts.
- scottlamb 2y ago
  > Low radiation steel is less needed because new steel is lower radiation. The atmospheric radiation level has dropped and steel making uses oxygen instead of air. > Presumably there are uses that need old steel but they are probably smaller amounts. This comment seems out of place? It would have made sense as a reply to a different comment thread in a different article a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41323780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41323780 but I don't get how/why it ended up here. No one was talking about steel at all, as far as I can see? edit: oh, there's another article today where folks are talking about low-background steel. I assume this comment was just supposed to go there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41436009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41436009
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    I meant the other post about wrecks.
snowwrestler 2y ago
The article is not about warhead technology, it is actually about the internal culture of how the military and nuclear-adjacent agencies classify and communicate about nuclear technology. But here’s the thing: that internal culture is just as opaque to outsiders as the technology itself! No outsider actually knows how the internal folks think, feel, and decide about little graphics or schematics or whatever. They’ve just inferred some heuristics from incomplete data. And this is basically just saying “this little graphic seems to violate my heuristics.” Which makes for interesting reading, but there is no real actual objectively verifiable content in this article. Betteridge’s Law tells us the answer to the headline question is always “no.” And in this case I think common sense agrees: Sandia Lab probably did not give the entire thermonuclear ballgame away with a logo graphic.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
evo 2y ago
I feel like the most novel aspect of this image is an implication of the shape of the reflective casing at the far rear of the device--it seems to suggest a parabolic "shaped charge" sort of focusing element that likely helps to boost the neutron flux and initiate the "spark plug" from the rear at the same time as from the front.
- dboreham 2y ago
  Hmm. I've read every book on the subject and I have a feeling I've heard this arrangement already somewhere (shape of the mirrors used to direct the radiation pressure, not neutron flux).
mannyv 2y ago
The best guess about fogbank is that it’s plutonium suspended in aerogel.
freestyle24147 2y ago
Please provide even one link to an image or book or anything that proves what you're saying is true. The fact that this is the top comment is troubling, since your question is answered throughout the article. The thing you're claiming (basically that imagery like this can be found all over the place) is so easy to prove, one wonders why you haven't done it here or in any of your other comments.
- gnfargbl 2y ago
  My question isn't answered in the article, as I repeatedly explain elsewhere in this thread. As you only require one reference, I will present K.S. Krane, Introductory Nuclear Physics, section 14.5 "Thermonuclear Weapons." The relevant schematic is numbered 14.19. I chose this because it's a textbook that I remember using myself; I'm not sure what is usually used these days.
  - rpdillon 2y ago
    I think the interesting thing about this release was mostly that it was released, not necessarily that the information is not obtainable elsewhere. But I dug up the diagram you mentioned just because I was curious. https://archive.org/details/introductory-nuclear-physics/page/554/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/introductory-nuclear-physics/pag... Seems pretty different from the image in the linked post.
    - gnfargbl 2y ago
      Yes, that's the schematic. To me the two look essentially identical save for topology and some imagined details. I don't believe either of them are actually representative of a function warhead; see for instance https://images.app.goo.gl/aEBGKmAb8NsoAWe87 https://images.app.goo.gl/aEBGKmAb8NsoAWe87, which suggests that in a real design the primary and secondary are inverted compared to the image shown in the blog post.
ein0p 2y ago
Yeah, the people you’d want to hide this from already know all this, and in some cases have superior designs.
beezle 2y ago
I remember when Jeff Lewis had a woody over FOGBANK. Wonder what they eventually replaced it with? Assume named CLOUDBANK or SNOWBANK ;)
Log_out_ 2y ago
plus the us disinvolvment has driven incentives to get nukes through the roof.ukraine support is a scary casus belli if you are the neighbor of a landenpire. Now imagine broke Pakistan auctioning off nukes to american allies in eastern europe or chinese neighbors. the maga movement has a price tag and thats that for this world order.

defrost 2y ago

> What is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? In two decades of crawling through most of the declassified public nuclear material from the US nuclear weapons program, some exposure to classified material, and numerous hours of interviews with working and retired nuclear scientists he believes it's the single most detailed schematic of an actual specific type of warhead he's seen so far. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/about-me/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/about-me/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Wellerstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Wellerstein As he's blogging about this it's almost certain he has had real current working nuclear weapons experts from his contact list read the advances and not disagree. Correct or not, it's not a casual random thought from someone with no exposure to such diagrams.

gnfargbl 2y ago
OK, but my question remains: what is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I did study nuclear physics to master's level. To my eye, there's nothing at all interesting about this image. It looks like informed speculation. Without any confirmation that this is a real weapons design (and I see no reason at all to believe it is) then it tells us absolutely nothing which hasn't been in the public domains for decades. > As he's blogging about this it's almost certain he has had real current working nuclear weapons experts from his contact list read the advances and not disagree. That seems extremely unlikely to me. People who have held the appropriate clearance to verify whether this is or is not representative of a real weapon, do not tend to casually liaise with someone who has spent their career attempting to prise open that veil of secrecy. In fact, their own careers and liberty depend on not making such personal connections.
- nmadden 2y ago
  The article goes into a lot of detail about why the author thinks its unusual.
- defrost 2y ago
  As nmadden noted there's a lot of detail in the article . > That seems extremely unlikely to me. None the less his nuclearsecrecy blog has been about for many many years and he's had a great deal of contact with people who have walked up to the line. It's not that uncommon for historians to have neither confirm nor deny but we can understand various silences relations with experts - even the OG Manhatten Project had embedded historians and archivists who toed the line on handling and preserving materials and held long meetings on what to release | not release and when. There are even a few DoE employed HN users here who know their areas of expertise and comment right up to the point where they shut up (an often shut down | change accounts) - they don't say what they shouldn't but they have chatted until they don't anymore .. which is interesting in itself.
  - gnfargbl 2y ago
    There's a lot of detail about why the author thinks it is notable that Sandia released this image. There's very little about what it is in this image itself that the author finds interesting, save for some comment about a dip which could be intended to focus neutron flux from the primary to the secondary. I feel that's the kind of thing an appropriate undergraduate would imagine in a short amount of time.
    - rsfern 2y ago
      I think you’re just looking for the surprise factor in the wrong place. The notability is all about Sandia’s public release criteria, which are pretty much orthogonal to whether or not the information is publicly known. I don’t think the author finds any particular detail interesting or new in and of itself, they even compare to other public illustrations that have the kind of detail you are talking about.
      - deleted 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

SiempreViernes 2y ago

The unusual thing, as stated repeatedly throughout the article, is that this is published by people who are under one of the strictest censorship systems in the world, a system that explicitly exist to prevent the publication exactly this sort of thing.

gnfargbl 2y ago
Yes. And as you'll know, since we both read the article, the author mentions what I believe to be the correct conclusion: > The “obvious” answer, if my above assertions are true, is that it must not actually represent a thermonuclear secondary. [...] It could be some kind of pre-approved “unclassified shape” which is used for diagnostics and model verification, for example. There are other examples of this kind of thing that the labs have used over time. That is entirely a possibility. However, he then goes on to immediately reject this "obvious" answer, because he thinks the well-known schematics of fission-fusion bombs give the appearance of a classified shape, and because he feels it is "provocative" for a government weapons lab to show a mock up of a well-known schematic in one of their publications. Those positions seem very weak to me.
- proto-n 2y ago
  He later finds basically the same object with the caption "The multiple components of a nuclear weapon body are highlighted in this intentionally simplified mesh" from another publication of Sandia, making that theory kind of unlikely
  - krisoft 2y ago
    I don't understand that conclusion. That sentence, in my mind, makes that conclusion more likely. They say it is an intentionally simplified mesh. Which to me means it is not the real deal. So why does this sentence makes you think the theory is unlikely? (Or what is the specific part of the theory you think it makes it unlikely?) Genuinely curious.
    - proto-n 2y ago

mhh__ 2y ago

Photos of even a hint of the inside are rare enough that he has another article show (in effect) a hint of an imprint from an old photocopying mistake. I also doubt it's useful, but Ted Taylor could supposedly walk around a room full of nukes and guess based on the shape of the casing what was unique about a design

taneliv 2y ago

Even so, it would be very unusual if I understand the author correctly: > ... at least historically, the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor organizations have frowned on disinformation and misinformation for other very practical reasons. If you release a lie, you run the risk of someone noticing it is a lie, which can draw more attention to the reality. And even misinformation/inaccuracy can put “brackets” around the possibilities of truth. The goal of these organizations is to leave a total blank in the areas that they don’t want people to know about, and misinformation/disinformation/inaccuracy is something other than a total blank. In other words, the author expected to see a previously familiar schematic or nothing. This is clearly not nothing, and also not a familiar schematic, hence the surprise.

matthewmcg 2y ago

He says it a few paragraphs in: “To give a sense of how strange this is, here is the only “officially sanctioned” way to represent a multistage thermonuclear weapon, according to US Department of Energy guidance since the 1990s: Figure 13.9, “Unclassified Illustration of a Staged Weapon (Source: TCG-NAS-2, March 1997),” from the Nuclear Matters Handbook 2020 (Revised), published by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters. Two circles in a box, maybe inside of a reentry vehicle. That’s it. Nothing that gives any actual sense of size, location, materials, physicality.”

gnfargbl 2y ago
If the story here is that the US DoE is now implicitly confirming common public-domain knowledge that can be found immediately on Wikipedia then sure, that's a story of minor interest. That story is nothing like the title of the blog, though!
- lazide 2y ago
  speculation can be found on Wikipedia, perhaps accurate speculation, perhaps not. DoE contractors leaking details that confirm that speculation would indeed be a big deal, and might well save adversaries some real time and mistakes they’d otherwise make.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Or it's a psyop designed to make adversaries waste their time on a design that couldn't work.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Spooks man, goddamn spooks!
    - why_only_15 2y ago
      In the post he mentions why he thinks this is unlikely and is not a thing the US has done previously.

bryant 2y ago

Find the paragraph that says "so this is awfully strange" and start there. It's a detailed analysis of the graphic in question, and what's "unusual" about it is that this graphic, with the detail identified by the author, has been published at all. The next paragraph details what the author would have expected to be published by comparison. And then figure 13.9 is what the DoD expects to see published at all.

thadt 2y ago

Not that the image itself is particularly useful or descriptive (it's not), but because the review office is rather quite conservative when deciding what to release, and anything suggestive of a real device is usually right out. In this case, the initial approval was probably an anomaly. I suspect that the reviewers looked at it that day and thought "eh, this is so far from reality that it's just not a big deal", and let it go. Any other day or set of reviewers and it probably would have been kicked back. It would be interesting to know the story around that approval, and what the fallout was, if any. Any further use isn't very surprising. Once it is approved and in the wild, re-using it is not really a problem (especially if being run through the same office for approval again).

tivert 2y ago

> What is it that the author thinks is particularly unusual about this image? Read the article and look at the "officially sanctioned" diagram. This looks like the tl;dr of what he things about this: > Anyway, I’m just surprised the DOE would release any image that gave really any implied graphical structure of a thermonuclear secondary, even if it is clearly schematic and meant to be only somewhat representative. It’s more than they usually allow! This linked post of his about an earlier redaction mistake also makes it clear (https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2021/05/17/how-not-to-redact-a-warhead/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2021/05/17/how-not-to-redact...): > ...but we’re given a rare glimpse inside of modern thermonuclear warheads. Now, there isn’t a whole lot of information that one can make out from these images. The main bit of “data” are the roughly “peanut-shaped” warheads, which goes along with what has been discussed in the open literature for decades about how these sorts of highly-efficient warheads are designed. But the Department of Energy doesn’t like to confirm such accounts, and certainly has never before let us glimpse anything quite as provocative about these warheads. The traditional bomb silhouettes for these warheads are just the dunce-cap re-entry vehicles, not the warheads inside of them.

ianburrell 2y ago

Low radiation steel is less needed because new steel is lower radiation. The atmospheric radiation level has dropped and steel making uses oxygen instead of air. Presumably there are uses that need old steel but they are probably smaller amounts.

scottlamb 2y ago
> Low radiation steel is less needed because new steel is lower radiation. The atmospheric radiation level has dropped and steel making uses oxygen instead of air. > Presumably there are uses that need old steel but they are probably smaller amounts. This comment seems out of place? It would have made sense as a reply to a different comment thread in a different article a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41323780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41323780 but I don't get how/why it ended up here. No one was talking about steel at all, as far as I can see? edit: oh, there's another article today where folks are talking about low-background steel. I assume this comment was just supposed to go there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41436009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41436009
- ianburrell 2y ago
  I meant the other post about wrecks.

snowwrestler 2y ago

The article is not about warhead technology, it is actually about the internal culture of how the military and nuclear-adjacent agencies classify and communicate about nuclear technology. But here’s the thing: that internal culture is just as opaque to outsiders as the technology itself! No outsider actually knows how the internal folks think, feel, and decide about little graphics or schematics or whatever. They’ve just inferred some heuristics from incomplete data. And this is basically just saying “this little graphic seems to violate my heuristics.” Which makes for interesting reading, but there is no real actual objectively verifiable content in this article. Betteridge’s Law tells us the answer to the headline question is always “no.” And in this case I think common sense agrees: Sandia Lab probably did not give the entire thermonuclear ballgame away with a logo graphic.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

evo 2y ago

I feel like the most novel aspect of this image is an implication of the shape of the reflective casing at the far rear of the device--it seems to suggest a parabolic "shaped charge" sort of focusing element that likely helps to boost the neutron flux and initiate the "spark plug" from the rear at the same time as from the front.

dboreham 2y ago
Hmm. I've read every book on the subject and I have a feeling I've heard this arrangement already somewhere (shape of the mirrors used to direct the radiation pressure, not neutron flux).

mannyv 2y ago

The best guess about fogbank is that it’s plutonium suspended in aerogel.

freestyle24147 2y ago

Please provide even one link to an image or book or anything that proves what you're saying is true. The fact that this is the top comment is troubling, since your question is answered throughout the article. The thing you're claiming (basically that imagery like this can be found all over the place) is so easy to prove, one wonders why you haven't done it here or in any of your other comments.

gnfargbl 2y ago
My question isn't answered in the article, as I repeatedly explain elsewhere in this thread. As you only require one reference, I will present K.S. Krane, Introductory Nuclear Physics, section 14.5 "Thermonuclear Weapons." The relevant schematic is numbered 14.19. I chose this because it's a textbook that I remember using myself; I'm not sure what is usually used these days.
- rpdillon 2y ago
  I think the interesting thing about this release was mostly that it was released, not necessarily that the information is not obtainable elsewhere. But I dug up the diagram you mentioned just because I was curious. https://archive.org/details/introductory-nuclear-physics/page/554/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/introductory-nuclear-physics/pag... Seems pretty different from the image in the linked post.
  - gnfargbl 2y ago
    Yes, that's the schematic. To me the two look essentially identical save for topology and some imagined details. I don't believe either of them are actually representative of a function warhead; see for instance https://images.app.goo.gl/aEBGKmAb8NsoAWe87 https://images.app.goo.gl/aEBGKmAb8NsoAWe87, which suggests that in a real design the primary and secondary are inverted compared to the image shown in the blog post.

ein0p 2y ago

Yeah, the people you’d want to hide this from already know all this, and in some cases have superior designs.

beezle 2y ago

I remember when Jeff Lewis had a woody over FOGBANK. Wonder what they eventually replaced it with? Assume named CLOUDBANK or SNOWBANK ;)

Log_out_ 2y ago

plus the us disinvolvment has driven incentives to get nukes through the roof.ukraine support is a scary casus belli if you are the neighbor of a landenpire. Now imagine broke Pakistan auctioning off nukes to american allies in eastern europe or chinese neighbors. the maga movement has a price tag and thats that for this world order.