🧵 FOGBANK
Anonymous at Sun, 19 May 2024 23:39:59 UTC No. 16183530
Fogbank is a code name given to a secret material used in the W76, W78 and W88 nuclear warheads
It had to literally be reverse engineered by the NNSA due to information loss since the cold war. It allegedly has an insanely crucial for the compression of the fusion stage within thermonuclear weapons - it also transfers energy from primary to secondary stages. I wonder , however, what is in that material? It has always interested me.
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 00:01:29 UTC No. 16183557
im probably on a list now for even asking the question
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 00:05:44 UTC No. 16183562
>>16183530
Some kind of aerogel.
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 00:34:25 UTC No. 16183614
>>16183562
yeah I thought it was some sort of doped aerogel
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 02:42:30 UTC No. 16183743
>>16183530
>>16183562
>>16183614
The original formulation was made imprecisely and had some contaminants in it. They didn't know exactly what the contaminants were, but they knew it worked with those contaminants in it because the bombs were tested with it like that. When they had to make more, they had to reverse engineer the contaminants and add them in precisely, deliberately this time, to ensure that all their old test data was still valid.
The bombs would still work without this precise formulation, they would just "need" to be tested again since the bombs are so important and high-stakes. And further nuclear testing isn't politically feasible, so it was easier to just reverse engineer the old stuff.
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 03:27:28 UTC No. 16183796
>>16183530
Oh not dont share your HAXX0R nuclear seecrets mylord!
The internet is full of articles about fogbank. This has not been a secret for at least 15 years.
TL;DR, the method for making it was lost, so research was done to make it again, and a better version was developed. The end,
These things happen all the time due to bad management, it only takes some key employee to quit and then knowledge gets lost, documentation gets lost, etc. Of course, things get reinvented over again.
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 03:28:40 UTC No. 16183797
>>16183530
fakengay
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 10:45:19 UTC No. 16184275
>>16183530
you ever wounder if all these dumbass blunders are just to keep the dipshits in Congress in their ventilators and out of the industrial complexs spooky spending.
>ahh yeah. that 50 million... we, ah, used it to find "Allis"... who we believe as a list of all the homosexuals on base.
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 11:27:54 UTC No. 16184307
>>16183557
No (you) are not. Amongst other things because (you) are not even considered able, nor have (you) demonstrated ability, to procude a fission bomb to begin with. No one cares about you asking around how to turn a fission (you) dont have into a fusion device.
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 13:33:57 UTC No. 16184484
>>16183743
Back before they replaced the 8" floppy disks used in silos, people were surprised the military used such old tech but when it comes to nuclear weapons, they really do like sticking with what's known to work and only will change if there's no other reasonable choice. Reverse engineering the contaminates sounds more reasonable than dealing with the various nuclear test treaties.
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 14:32:32 UTC No. 16184554
>>16184484
The NNSA labs even still use the same machining equipment from the 30s that they bought used during the Manhatten project to make certain components. They've been able to keep them working with spare parts from eBay during the 2010s but they basically have no plans for what to do when they run out.
The problem is that even the slightest changes can affect the neutronics or radiation transport properties and the existing simulation tools aren't good enough to guarantee that things will actually work so a lot of time and money is wasted doing everthing short of actually detonating a nuke just to get some sort of experimental results.
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 17:49:02 UTC No. 16184773
>>16184554
>>16184554
All that stinks of a cargo cult. Certainly the experts are able to understand the effects of changes in designs and do make gradual improvements to designs
Anonymous at Mon, 20 May 2024 23:22:06 UTC No. 16185274
>>16184773
Their paranoia is mostly justfied if you look at all of their ICF work which they have to deal with because of the test ban, where Z experiments are fucked up because of radiative losses from trace impurities in nominally pure beryllium liners and NIF implosions failing because of microscopic machining imperfections or weird LPI effects in the Hohlraum. And there's the castle bravo test which was a disaster because of some low probability, high threshold reaction that had never been measured before.
There are too many unknown unknowns which can have much larger than expected effects, especially when you're dealing with matter at extreme temperatures and pressures where there isn't great data.