how weird are the electronics actually used in nuclear weapons?

[james_s]

You seem to live in a rather strange and paranoid reality, most people do not have neighbors peeping on them and going through their trash. Most people who post information on a forum like this are going to get suspicious and clam up if someone starts contacting them offline and picking their brain for information. It's just not a big deal, there's absolutely nothing being discussed here that is not publicly available and if one wants to find people who work on weapons, hanging out at bars and restaurants nearby aerospace companies is going to offer a much higher density of potential marks.

[raptor1956]

what do you mean by non socially popular?

Tell people at a dinner party you design nuclear or some other weapons system and see how well it goes down.

Unless you're Tony Stark!


Brian

[coppercone2]

You seem to live in a rather strange and paranoid reality, most people do not have neighbors peeping on them and going through their trash. Most people who post information on a forum like this are going to get suspicious and clam up if someone starts contacting them offline and picking their brain for information. It's just not a big deal, there's absolutely nothing being discussed here that is not publicly available and if one wants to find people who work on weapons, hanging out at bars and restaurants nearby aerospace companies is going to offer a much higher density of potential marks.

It's pretty easy to piss someone off (i.e. fell trees next to a misguided environmentalist, from experience). Also dealing with the insurance company and possibly homeowners association is no fun either. All sorts of retarded animosity is developed here, for instance take this
a well implemented terrain feature to hide trash cans....

i had some old woman leering and doing noise complaints because of tree cutting. fucking annoying. the complaints for noise only started after the lumber was discovered. she got sensitive hearing all the sudden.

but foreign governments must be a little interested, why would this occur? (notice the 127pg clearance forms being stolen, that have psychological evals on em).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach

[m98]

most people do not have neighbors peeping on them and going through their trash.

You don't know German neighborhoods...

[coppercone2]

most people do not have neighbors peeping on them and going through their trash.

You don't know German neighborhoods...

old lady security network there?

[m98]

old lady security network there?

More reliable and invasive than any intelligence agency could ever be, yes. They once even found out that I own a car in another city and asked me about it a few days after I moved to my current apartment.

I remember it because the story said some Radio Shack capacitors ended up in cruise missiles.

Totally plausible. There's also one big hobbyist electronics distributor here who's probably not aware of how many of their components are currently in earth orbit and beyond.

[coppercone2]

security anywhere but UK in europe.

[ferdieCX]

There's also one big hobbyist electronics distributor here who's probably not aware of how many of their components are currently in earth orbit and beyond.

Big "C" perhaps ?

[LaserSteve]

Having been a guest at many facilities that handle odd things, I assure you the powers that be are well aware of blogging. They fear USB sticks, far, far more then they fear blogging. 

 BTW,  Blogging got me the interesting job that I held for a year and a half  before returning to the university.

Humorous anecdote.  At a recent family reunion,  about three years ago, my non-technical female  cousin asked me to explain what I was doing at the time. I was on the road going from  facility to facility to facility installing and repairing  lab lasers.   After trying to explain briefly why tunable lasers were important for lab measurements, and that my clients had interesting locations to travel to, I clammed up.
 
 After all why spoil dinner with nerd talk, other then the standard  story and my pics of a national lab  having  rented herds of goats or  to mow the  grass.   She still was puzzled about what I did, and pressed the issue.  So one of my other cousins, quite soused at the time,  blurts out "Steve helps with testing  Nuclear Bombs".  While nothing could be further from the truth, I assure you the answer was accepted, and there was no criticism, in fact people were impressed....   

Now if she only knew what her brother  across the table used to do at a building in the outskirts of DC, she might have really  been speechless.

Generally my corporate employers have been more woried about securing things then some of the places I visited as a guest.  The peace dividend resulted in most  of my then clients working on alternative topics.


Steve

[jmelson]

I mean if a standard engineer that maybe saw a taste of low end military was actually presented with a circuit, would we go 'holy crap that belongs in the art of electronics as its own chapter' or would it be more like 'they dotted their i's and crossed their t's'?

The early weapons were barely electronic at all.  The Los Alamos "gadget" (tested at Trinity site, and basically just put in a housing for dropping on Nagasaki (called "Fat Man") used a vibrator and rectifiers to to generate several thousand Volts to fire a spark gap that triggered the exploding wire initiators for the explosive lenses.  A capacitor dumped through the spark gap to a signal distributor that ran the firing pulse to the initiators through matched-length coax cables.  REALLY simple stuff.

The only electronics in Fat Man (and I'm guessing in Little Boy, also) were the altitude trigger, which was based on aircraft radar altimeters.
You can clearly see the radar altimeter's antenna on pictures of Fat Man.

Don't worry about a visit from the feds, this is REALLY old technology, and pretty well documented in many places.

Modern weapons have gotten a lot more sophisticated, using 2-point initiation and a neutron gun based on a linear accelerator, instead of a tiny neutron source at the center of the Plutonium.  So, there has to be some precise timing so the neutrons get to the center of the Plutonium "pit" right at the moment of maximum implosion.  I've never seen any mention of how they do this.

Instead of a spark gap, they use a gas device called a Krytron, also a pretty highly classified device.  They were in the news some decades ago as Iran, I think, was trying to buy some.  The pulse discharge capacitors are also classified, I think Saddam Hussain was trying to buy those, or get details of construction.

Finally, there are systems to prevent unauthorized use of these weapons, called Permissive Action Links.  These are REALLY restricted, as they want to make sure the guys trusted with handling the weapons do not know how to defeat them.  If the PAL is tampered with, it will fire the initiators in the wrong sequence, blowing the weapon to dust.  These are supposedly a mixture of electronic and mechanical parts.  DoE was at one time looking into using MEMS to make it harder to figure out how the PAL works or defeat it.  I don't know if that got implemented.

Jon

[coppercone2]

i think there is a entire season of 24 about something like the PAL.

there is patents and research about using krytron like devices to work as kind of precise/better GDT for circuit protection actually. I find that stuff very interesting. You can also buy them for large prices on ebay or used to be able to.

sandia labs 'nutristor' may interest you. I find it interesting but I don't really want to be around neutron radiation.

[jmelson]

I wonder if its dangerous to be around a nuclear weapon incase the neutron generators kick in by accident. It would be really nasty to get a dose of neutron radiation. Worst kind of radiation IMO.  There must be a interesting control loop there.

They only need a half dozen neutrons, delivered to the right spot at EXACTLY the right time (+/- a microsecond at the very most).  So, you would never know if the neutron source were turned on, from the neutrons, anyway.  Since everything is connected together, and a lot of this stuff is operated by exploding something, I suspect (but don't know) that the weapon has a fair likelihood of blowing up at SOME level if the neutron source was triggered.  All this stuff is designed for EXACTLY one use, and many parts of the weapon are performing their special task while something else is exploding just an inch away!  Crazy stuff to design.

Jon

[coppercone2]

i have read about logic gates formed with strip explosives before, it would make sense to have a interlock in the explosives that must be triggered electrically to allow for the correct detonation conditions to be present. like implementing the condition that the explosion must be occurring and then later that the explosion is occurring correctly (the explosive logic) to trigger  the neutron gun. It should make it more of a fizzle, since you want it as deenergized as possible unless its happening perfectly.

[jmelson]

The nerd in me wants to know more about the nuts and bolts of the safety system designs and how, by sheer luck, none have actually been fully circumvented.  I'd love to have a more technical analysis about some of the incidents.

After some near misses in the 1950's and 60's, with bombs that were in aircraft crashes and fires, they improved the PALs, and were so worried that they transferred the designs to the Russians, and asked them to implement something similar.  They apparently did, and told as few people as possible that this device was included.

A Soviet sub, K-129 went rogue in March, 1968.  They apparently planned to start world war III by firing a missile at Hawaii.  These Soviet subs could launch missiles while submerged, but the copy they sold to the Chinese could not, they had to surface to fire.  So, these guys surfaced and tried to fire a missile while they knew one of the US spy satellites was passing overhead.  What they didn't know was that the
Russian-version PAL would destroy the missile on launch.  The sub sank.

Then, the US mounted a mission to retrieve the sub.  Howard Hughes' Glomar company built the Glomar Explorer to precisely locate the sunk sub, and then built the Glomar Challenger to lift it from the ocean floor.  In the process of this, they saw pictures of the blasted top of the launch tube and eventually decided they had to tell the Russians about it.

This is all pretty public knowledge, see Wikipedia K-129 for a start on this incredible story.

Jon

[coppercone2]

is there actually plausible evidence to a false flag attack? I saw this occur in the movie Phantom.

[T3sl4co1l]

is there actually plausible evidence to a false flag attack? I saw this occur in the movie Phantom.

Outside of alt-right fantasies and conspiracy theories, no.

I don't know of any famously successful such missions, offhand, but someone more familiar can probably list some attempts and their successes or failures...

Tim

[LaserSteve]

Here, have a long, good read:

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

Krytrons, at least from the usual supplier, have long been out of production. I had tried to order one for a pulsed ruby laser about a decade ago and was told the line was closed. The sales guy lamented the loss in commercial use sales, which was substantial, but MBAs often close production lines for marginal products or products outside the scope of their "core" business.  It pretty much would have been a swap, provide the old unit or its serial number and proof of a legit use.  Most of the ones made evidently never were used in the traditional, popular application of triggers, but evidently in commercial equipment with flashlamps, so he said. 

Steve

[Housedad]

Well, military hardware must be rugged.  that means that it is usually not bleeding edge stuff.  It takes a while for bleeding edge tech to mature to that level. 

Case in point and rather on subject, my brother was a Navy nuclear missile technician, submarine in the early 70's.  Even though there were quite a bit of advanced electronics available,  he lamented in much later years that the control systems even for new ordinance was woefully lagging the consumer world.  We are talking tubes here.  In advanced weaponry, long after it would be considered obsolete elsewhere. 

Why?  because it was tried and true hardened designs.  For instance, as he put it, they could only use a special variation of the tektronix 585, as that was the only scope certified to withstand the EMP of a nearby blast.   They understood that if they got a near hit and received a heavy Rad dose, the men would only have as short as 10 minutes of useful life.   In that time they had to do repairs and launch.  But the god-dang scopes and other equipment HAD to survive.  The men only needed to last long enough to launch.

[Kilrah]

Tell people at a dinner party you design nuclear or some other weapons system and see how well it goes down.

Not a problem in my experience. In fact people are quite impressed.

Well you have a USA flag in your profile, so yes, still OK there... but it most other parts of the world anything military is now commonly considered as disgusting.

[coppercone2]

yea but so is dealing with fundie islamists and commies

[Lord of nothing]

yea but so is dealing with fundie islamists

Found by the USA and UAE. 
How many Terrorist from the 11.9 Terror Attack was from the UAE? 
I know Bush had a sever Brain Damage and Choose the wrong Country just for Kicks. 

[N2IXK]

Anyone interested in the actual "nuts and bolts" of nuclear weapons needs to get a copy of John Coster-Mullen's book:

https://www.amazon.com/Atom-Bombs-Secret-Inside-Little/dp/B0006S2AJ0

I was amazed to see that it includes a schematic diagram of the "X-unit" that fired the Trinity and Nagasaki "Fat Man" plutonium bombs. The firing pulse to the detonators was generated by a hydrogen thyratron driving triggered spark gaps. Not all that different from contemporary radar pulse modulators, actually.

There are a couple of very interesting videos on YouTube that offer short glimpses of nuclear weapon electronics, as well:

[coppercone2]

yea but so is dealing with fundie islamists

Found by the USA and UAE. 
How many Terrorist from the 11.9 Terror Attack was from the UAE? 
I know Bush had a sever Brain Damage and Choose the wrong Country just for Kicks. 

ok so then you just have more commies to fight, what does it matter, their actually better at wrecking shit then terrorists. Terrorists don't seem to cause starvation for instance. Or cause ridiculous ecological disasters.

[coppercone2]

Anyone interested in the actual "nuts and bolts" of nuclear weapons needs to get a copy of John Coster-Mullen's book:

https://www.amazon.com/Atom-Bombs-Secret-Inside-Little/dp/B0006S2AJ0

I was amazed to see that it includes a schematic diagram of the "X-unit" that fired the Trinity and Nagasaki "Fat Man" plutonium bombs. The firing pulse to the detonators was generated by a hydrogen thyratron driving triggered spark gaps. Not all that different from contemporary radar pulse modulators, actually

I actually have a laser triggered thyratron pulser thats supposed to trigger something through a transformer. I think its a radar or experimental physics set. It's very pretty.

[David Hess]

My question is, wouldn't a single mechanical switch do just fine, with detonators connected in parallel, assuming you match the lengths of trigger wires that go to the conventional explosives? Yes, I understand that in order to get better sync you need high power, but the mechanical switch I have in my mind are two beefy blocks of copper that are pushed together by a small explosive charge (gun type).
However, the declassified data we have available suggests that this approach would not work, so what am I missing?

I looked into this at one point and concluded that the parallel impedance of the transmission lines going to the detonators is too low to drive so separate switches are required.  I do not even think a transmission line switch would work because of power limitations at such a low impedance when what you really want is closer to 25 ohms to save weight and space.