Are We Losing Nuclear Expertise?

Air Force Magazine ^ | May, 2006 | John A. Tirpak

[Kenny Bunkport]

[snowrip]

New names have been added to the list of nations hostile to the interests of the US, but China is not among them.

Huh?

[glorgau]

there might not be enough qualified engineers “available for potential next generation systems,”

No problem, just bring in some more H1-Bs to "do the jobs that Americans won't do".

[Alas Babylon!]

I don't think China is a "new" name to add to the list, as it has been on the list for decades.

[prophetic]

we should get rid of all those liberals & environ weenies that has been constantly weakening America's potential in nuclear & military matters.

Start with ALL the leftists in the Senate and work your way down, then the MSM, next the Lefist/commie groups. etc

[Myrddin]

I left this line of work in 1993 as the funding dried up. My colleagues also found alternative work. We keep in touch and maintain our clearances. We could reconstitute the expertise in fairly short order. What we can't do is stop the passage of time. We're getting older and there are no younger people coming into the program to learn the ropes.

To comprehend the magnitude of the problem, the software is 1 million lines of C and 1 million lines of FORTRAN. Most of it has been coded and tested by people with a PhD in nuclear physics and 20+ years of hands-on experience testing real nukes in the desert areas of Nevada. Some parties also did evaluations of Hiroshima. This isn't the kind of work that a newbie with no experience is going to do. It's going to take bright people with the right degrees and a few years of working with the old hands to reach any reasonable level of proficiency.

[The Duke]

Why don't we just outsource our nuke program to the Chinese?

Oh, wait, I keep forgetting that Bill Clinton already did that in exchange for cold, hard campaign cash.

[Paul Ross]

This isn't the kind of work that a newbie with no experience is going to do. It's going to take bright people with the right degrees and a few years of working with the old hands to reach any reasonable level of proficiency.

Precisely. It's not amenable to quick-fixes. Solving this will take a high degree of seriousness at the policy-level (both White House and Congressional), giving both DOD and DOE a real mission and real resources to keep these abilities from atrophying into non-existence.

Otherwise, we will have an inevitable result: Unilateral disarmament by neglect.

[Herakles]

"“Experienced personnel are nearing retirement with few replacements. This situation could lead to the potential loss of critical strategic strike systems knowledge,” the group asserted."

I got news for you Jack; the good people left so as not to have the door hit them in the ass a decade and a half ago!

"Are We Losing Nuclear Expertise?"

Where have these guys been; take it from an old Nuke, when you don't pay people and do everything to make them leave, guess what - they leave, AND DON"T GO BACK!

Hope these guys don't have to buy this crap from the Chinese because people like me really don't care anymore about their problems! Then again if you want to pay seven figures like you pay your worthless movie stars, I might see my way to help you a little bit - but that would be only a little bit!

Oh yea, the new guys, well lets just say they are not as knowledgeable as the old guys - keep your fingers crossed when you go to use this crap!

[PeterFinn]

Bang that nail right on the head.

[Paul Ross]

Somehow I don't think the Chinese PLA has a "Ministry of Silly Walks".

What is likely very sad is that while our nuclear capabilities expire...the PLA may have a very capable complement of nuclear physicists and technicians assembled. Ready to swiftly move to deploy far more deliverable nuclear devices than the FAS [Federation of American Scientists] or BAT [Bulletin of Atomic Scientists] or UCS [Union of Concerned Scientists] folks believe they could do.

And they are simply patiently waiting us out to see our nuclear armaments capability implode.

It doesn't help that they likely have a leg up, avoiding all the blind alleys of R&D that we spent over $50 billion of research working around. Their espionage here has been ridiculously successful at the U.S. National Labs.

The copied W-88 is one example. And they already have, apparently, shown the capacity to do neutron warheads which they even admitted to in 2002.

Some purported satellite photos of one of their airburst tests of a 1Kt device is depicted below:

I fear that we will know about the error of our ways with China only when it is indeed too late.

[PghBaldy]

IIRC, women are either a majority, or nearly a majority of new college students. http://wie.engineering.ucdavis.edu/pages/articles/articles_men_women_eng.html Some over sampling of minority components, such as women engineers, was conducted to ensure that data accumulated was sufficient to provide statistically valid results. I bet much of what is going in the US is due to extreme feminism. This leads to problems such as expressed in this article. Men & women are different...

[operation clinton cleanup]

The last such missile, the Peacekeeper, was designed in the 1970s.

and that ended up being a watered down version of the MX placed in silos. Russia has mobile ICBM's, why can't we?

[GOP_1900AD]

Redirect all non military NASA funding into reseeding our domestic armaments and platforms industries. Give a tax holiday to them all. Immediately stop all non military work at national labs. Conduct supply chain reviews of all military hardware down to the subcomponent level and for all supply chains originating in hostile or unreliable countries, begin a break neck program to replace them with ones from the US and true allied countries. Make a black and white list of which countries are our true friends and all others, and trade only with the true friends. Etc. War preparations must commence immediately for the inevitable (and, actually, winnable) Third World War.

[GOP_1900AD]

They will turn them out like sausages. In fact, maybe they already are turning them out.

[Myrddin]

I recall seeing those two final pictures circulating around my floor. The satellite photo analysis people brought them down for for friendly advice.

I was working in the bunker at SHAPE when the Chinese did the 1 MT underground test. The guys playing darts in the back of the room suddenly took a real keen interest in some other tasks. It dawned on me that I was working inside a high value, highly fortified target.

[Myrddin]

Sounds like you had a similar experience when Clinton arrived and budgets took a severe cut. I figured out how to make my team lean and survivable with the limited money. The rest of us peddled our skills elsewhere. The problem is that we have all been extremely successful in peddling our services. It would take a fairly serious threat to break us away from our new lines of business.

[A. Pole]

It's going to take bright people with the right degrees and a few years of working with the old hands to reach any reasonable level of proficiency.

What if the "old hands" are not around anymore?

[GOPJ]

I left this line of work in 1993 as the funding dried up. My colleagues also found alternative work. We keep in touch and maintain our clearances. We could reconstitute the expertise in fairly short order. What we can't do is stop the passage of time. We're getting older and there are no younger people coming into the program to learn the ropes.

Our pols are so short sighted. What can be done to transfer the information so when the time comes, it will be there?