Keeping the United States’ nuclear arsenal ready for use is an ongoing process, one which is necessarily shrouded in complete secrecy. In an article by The War Zone these developments and the secrets behind it are touched upon, including a secret ingredient for these thermonuclear warheads that is only officially known as ‘Fogbank’, but which is very likely aerogel.
As noted by a commentator, this is pretty much confirmed in an article published by Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) in the 2nd 2009 issue (PDF) of Nuclear Weapons Journal. On page nine the article on hohlraum-based inertial confinement fusion notes the use of aerogel to tamp the radially inward motion of the wall material, suggesting a similar function within one of these thermonuclear warheads.
The research at the Nuclear Ignition Facility (NIF) over at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is directly related to these thermonuclear weapons, as they are based around inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which is what the NIF is set up for to study, including the role of aerogel. ICF is unlikely to ever be used for energy production, as we noted in the past, but makes it possible to study aspects of detonating a thermonuclear weapon that are difficult to simulate and illegal to test with real warheads.
Currently it seems that after decades of merely reusing the Fogbank material in refurbished warheads, new material is now being produced again, with it likely being used in the new W93 warhead and the low-yield W76 and life-extended W76-1 variants. All of which is of course pure conjecture, barring the details getting leaked on the War Thunder forums to settle a dispute on realistic US thermonuclear weapon yields.
If you’re looking for an interesting read on nuclear weapons check out “Broń Jądrowa” by Jerzy Kubowski ISBN: 9788320433869. His book on NPPs “Elektrownie Jądrowe” ISBN: 9788301193560 is pretty good too.
Would they be available in English?
Sadly no. Maybe some OCR translate would do.
Because not talking about something doesn’t make it cease to exist. That’s an extremely common lie believed among a certain segment of the population lately though, so it’s not surprising to see it here.
Sharing intimate technical details makes it massively easier for adversaries to develop countermeasures. Of all the things kept secret, the most critical are the decoys meant to draw enemy defences away from the real thermonuclear reentry vehicles. Any hint of a difference between the two is the difference between an effective counterattack and total defeat.
This is not software development, where defense is the name of the game and it can be refined to become mathematically impenetrable. This is physical combat with mutually assured destruction, where offensive capability is the only thing that matters. The more the enemy knows about your offensive capabilities, the better they can develop specific countermeasures.
I agree
I believe the comment is an orphaned reply to the one saying weapons shouldn’t be covered, rather than aimed at the article itself.
I don’t really disagree with the original, now missing, comment, but I also immediately read the article and was fascinated. I’m a hypocrite though.
Oh, is that what this was about? Does someone really think HaD writers are going to discover anything that the best and brightest that state level actors can provide don’t already know?
That’s funny.
OTOH, if they don’t know enough about your offense capability to fear it then they have no reason not to launch their own and so everyone dies.
Think of all the outrage over balloons.
I’m pretty sure that balloons flying over our nuclear sponge can’t detect what Fogbank actually is but they can show a picture of big doors in the ground that likely hide missiles one doesn’t ever want to see fired.
“one which is necessarily shrouded in complete secrecy”
No. ‘Complete secrecy’ is not necessary in a democratic republic. Engineering details of weapons systems are ‘necessarily’ secret, and perhaps some tactical deployment information should be secret. But policies, logistics, strategies, implementation, and fiscal details should never be hidden from the well-taxed citizen.
frankly im of the opinion that pure fusion warheads* should be developed, and made open source, just so we can build breeder reactors without worrying about proliferation.
as for how to do that, il just leave this here:
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2022/03/fusion-without-fissiles-superbombs-and.html
Not allowed by our current understanding of the laws of physics.
How would they not be allowed by the laws of physics? Hard, sure, but not allowed, no. Just because you can’t fly doesn’t mean it is impossible for living things to fly.
The EU probably passed a law against it. Physics was threatened with a fine of 20% of the universe.
totally permissible under the laws of physics. read the linked article, its good. making an explosion is a lot different than making a power reactor. one maximizes entropy which the universe likes, the other to suppress it, which the universe hates.
It would ALSO be a proliferation nightmare. Imagine every organized crime family with a nuclear warhead.
Reminds me of a Heinlein book I read as a teen. Part of the subplot was that IBM (in this story, the 3rd most powerful company in the world other than Coca-Cola and another company integral to the main plot) wanted some land in Mexico for something, but the government declined. So IBM nuked Acapulco. The implication was, how do you retaliate against something like that? Short sell their stock?
Just imagine a figure like Elon Musk with the power, money, smarts, and recruiting ability to form a company who’s sole purpose is to build an NGO nuke.
musk wants to backup human civilization, not destroy it.
my theory about the whole thing is that mutually assured destruction works, and that if every faction is armed with wmds then everyone suddenly develops really good manors.
Didn’t mean to imply Musk specifically, just meant somebody like him with the attributes but an obviously different agenda.
I thought I had read everything Heinlein wrote (yes, sadly, even Starship Troopers) but I don’t recall IBM nuking Acapulco. What story was that?
” if every faction is armed with wmds then everyone suddenly develops really good manors.”
Well, yes, I’m sure everyone would want nuclear-hardened manors to survive the exchange.
@Paul — “Friday”, if I’m not mistaken.
Ha. Friday. It’s been 40 years since I read that. I don’t remember IBM, but I do remember the quote “Don’t I look human?”
The feds bitch and moan, but they have literally thousands of thermonuclear warheads.
I’ve only got three.
I’m more worried about the (African sleeping sickness)x(Mad Cow)x(Dengue) I’ve got brewing in the bioreactor.
Tricky three way to arrange. You have to get the virus and prion drunk, bacteria is date rapist. Just like South Park.
Fail to keep complete secrecy around the function of your nuclear warheads and the operation of their decoys, and you will give everything your adversary needs to develop interceptors that can tell one from the other. Then a relatively stable MAD (which we’ve enjoyed for 70 years) becomes one-sided annihilation at a moment’s notice.
MAD works only if both sides are relatively equal.
One worry is that if one side independently comes up with a reliable, workable, defense to hypersonic, stealth warheads (and by implication all other types of warheads), then war will happen — either by the aggressor getting desperate to wipe out the enemy before he can deploy his defense, or by the defender getting cocky.
Another worry is the big vs. small arsenals. Very little is keeping the US from wiping out North Korea if the US thinks for a second that absorbing 1 or 2 warheads will be the sole cost, for example.
we have precedent for asymmetrical use of nuclear weapons. take out a couple critical cities and you force diplomacy. ended ww2 pretty fast. in addition we have plenty of cases of powers with nukes refraining to use them in wars.
i dont think anyone would make a choice to lose a couple cities in order to take out a historic enemy that is presently not shooting at you.
the bigger threat i think is the smaller nuclear powers with small arsenals. not the world killer that an exchange between the us and russia would cause. but enough to leave a few craters and a lot of uninhabitable territory in both countries, a radiological disaster, probibly a refugee crisis, and potentially starting a larger exchange.
nukes lose out in any cost-benefit analysis with the exception of ending ww2. and that was only viable because they were new and nobody would have believed you id you said you had something like that without seeing one go off in your back yard.
If North Korea decided to nuke the US, I doubt the US would retaliate with nukes. It’s very bad optics, especially as 99% of NK’s population are victims of the regime.
[Dan]
It was an unwritten(?) rule that assassinations of enemy leaders was forbidden. But that rule was recently ignored by a country in the Middle East. So, a possible response to a Nork nuke on the USA could be to knock out only the leadership.
“we have precedent for asymmetrical use of nuclear weapons”
No need to nuke cities, just use EMP which provides an incredible asymmetrical advantage for use against a technologically advanced county like the US by a “dark at night as seen from space” undeveloped country like North Korea. That’s why US ABMs are where they are – Alaska – and are designed for a very limited attack.
Nothing other than directed energy weapons or “brilliant pebbles” kinetic interceptors would be useful against a large attack:
Countermeasures
A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned US National Missile Defense System
Union of Concerned Scientists
MIT Security Studies Program
April 2000
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2019-09/countermeasures.pdf
EMP threat is overblown.
In the 1980s they passed a law regarding electromagnetic interference.
Most electronics are decently shielded against EMP, same same.
At ranges where your not getting outright nuked, a typical car will die, but restart when faced with an EMP.
Which isn’t to say their won’t be damage, just that it comes down to the antenna. Long distance transmission lines in particular will see large DC values. But those are getting mitigated, it’s the same physics as a Carrington event.
R
@haha
That is not correct, a nuclear EMP will cause a massive spike in all wires too, including the ones past the fuse, and that will fry most things.
And cars are now all electronic and have cellphone and BT connectivity so are actively trying to receive electromagnetic signals and not exactely shielded against a massive EMP.
Makes you think though, would all phones in people’s pockets explode into flame in case of a massive EMP? I mean all circuitry including the battery protection would fry right? And there would be a spike on them.
And the hopitals would have to work without electronics, including lighting.. that’s not a good scenario.
It’s always strange to find somebody who still thinks that principles are more important than power. None of it works this way
You have obviously never had to do any OPSEC or intelligence work.
In today’s world of information aggregation, inferring “secret” information by combining related public information is trivial.
We have an entire global marketing industry built around the idea.
If Amazon knows when you are running low on shampoo, despite you never buying it from them, how hard do you think it is to get tactically important information by combining the information you think should be publicly available?
You know what’s up. There have been multiple students in the US that have developed working designs from open source info. Here is one from 1965: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/24/usa.science
Another was a student at Princeton/Harvard. Can’t find a source for that one quickly though.
Theodore Taylor in his excellent book “The Curve of Binding Energy” described how easy it is.
Well, John McPhee, in writing that book about Ted Taylor, discussed Ted talking about how easy it is.
An article that discusses “aerogels” and doesn’t say what they are might as well be about contrails or Morgellon’s. Secrecy’s important because what if other countries, oh wait. Never mind, carry on!
Anyone who reads this site already knows
National Ignition Facility
Am I the only one that thinks the 3 guys were instructed to strike a pose? I mean look at them! :)
–think
So aerogels will be/are replacing the Styrofoam in some nuclear devices?
FOGBANK
https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/
Very interesting stuff in the PDF linked below from Theodore Taylor, former nuclear weapons designer, about some of the designes he knows are possible.
“I tried to find out what was the smallest bomb you could produce, and it was a lot smaller than Davy Crockett, but it was never built in those years,” he said. “It certainly has been since then. It was a full implosion bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about 6 inches in diameter.”
Strange Love
Or, how they learned to start worrying and love to hate the bomb.
https://cdn.makezine.com/make/strangelove.pdf
Restricted Data
A Nuclear History Blog
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
Nuke your least favorite city:
http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
So this is not only conjecture but it’s conjecture based upon 15-year-old conjecture which is from a book someone wrote. Aerogel has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and is used as a lightweight thermal insulator. Research into Aerogel was in its infancy in 2009.
Thermonuclear weapons use fission devices as triggers. They discovered fairly early on that if you put a bunch of liquid hydrogen next to a fission device and detonated it, the yield increased dramatically. This was a natural yield-enhancement experiment to run given that hydrogen is abundant and that it is explosive in its own right, but no one really expected those sorts of yield enhancements. You’ve probably read stories about how the yield of our thermonuclear weapons was dialed down in accordance with the START treaty. Ever wonder how this was possible? All you have to do is drain some of the liquid hydrogen out of the hydrogen tanks. The high-yield thermonuclear weapons of the early Cold War period were extremely large and heavy exclusively because of the larger tanks.
One piece of information which is technically classified but is widely known is that tritium is used for generating neutrons in enhanced fission devices. I’ve actually created concepts for further enhancing these devices and for fissioning stable isotopes.
The primary limiting factors on the shelf-life of fission devices is the decay of the fissile materials. Beyond this, you have to keep the weapons in a dry, climate-controlled place in order to keep moisture from getting into the circuitry and wiring, naturally. This is really all old news. We’d like to be able to spend less on replacing the fuel cores in our aging nuclear weapons but it’s difficult to do this as China continues to grow its arsenal and as new players join the nuclear club every few years.
Most thermonuclear weapons use lithium deuteride (generally enriched in lithium-6 rather than natural isotope abundances) instead of lithium-deuterium. Lithium-deuterium gas (not liquid) is injected into the fission pit of boosted devices. Dial a yield works by varying fission boosting, altering timing for the neutron initiator, and potentially modifying the interstage x-ray or plasma aperture.