Are We Losing Nuclear Expertise?

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

[Doctor Stochastic]

I would say (from experience) that the Current Administration is doing its best to run off scientists from this type of research. The Previous Administration tried but they were less competent. The political wranglings around nuclear weapons work makes is less stressful to be a lumberjack (as well as better paying.) Things have deteriorated monotonically at least since 1980 (and probably before.)

[indthkr]

"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!

I suspect that they also tell their kids (and friends kids) to NOT GO THERE as well -> become a trial lawyer. I guess when the time comes, we can use all our trial lawyers as kinetic energy weapons by dropping them from high altitude on targets. We certainly have a huge stockpile.

[Myrddin]

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

People who understand fundamental principles are prepared to learn how things work in the real world. The real world is often very different from what is taught in school. A person who has just passed the necessary FCC exams to be the responsible engineer at a broadcast station is well versed in laws and theory. Learning how to operate and adjust the actual equipment is a completely different set of skills. The problem is similar in the nuke business. The clueless newbie won't know where to look or what to do. Errors of omission and commission will be common. If you're lucky, the errors will simply slow the process to the desired objective. Mistakes with nukes is a bad idea.

The short answer is that absent the old hands to mentor another generation to take responsiblity, we essentially lose the ability to leverage the technology. The billions of dollars expended to develop and perfect the technology is lost. Our competitive and strategic advantage is lost.

[Myrddin]

I would say (from experience) that the Current Administration is doing its best to run off scientists from this type of research. The Previous Administration tried but they were less competent. The political wranglings around nuclear weapons work makes is less stressful to be a lumberjack (as well as better paying.) Things have deteriorated monotonically at least since 1980 (and probably before.)

I'm working on another project that has been plagued with difficulty in finding cleared staff with the right skills and real ability to deliver. The good news is that we have managed to recruit a few top flight people under age 30. I'm pleased to see that happen. The new kids are still going through the clearance process. We still need to find some quality young candidates with math and physics PhDs that can take on the signal processing tasks.

I refer to some of them as "kids" as our Java GUI developer is 2 months younger than my middle son.

[Myrddin]

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

My former project is keeping the irons hot with a reduced staff, reduced budget and a controlled maintenance process. The code jockeys are keeping the software maintained. The atrophy and attrition is happening in the ranks of the physicists who designed the methods and procedures that are memorialized in the current code base. It is their research money that has been restricted.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[A. Pole]

The short answer is that absent the old hands to mentor another generation to take responsiblity, we essentially lose the ability to leverage the technology. The billions of dollars expended to develop and perfect the technology is lost. Our competitive and strategic advantage is lost.

So it mean that people are the most important asset. Not the preserved hardware or the one cheaply purchased from abroad.

[Paul Ross]

So it mean that people are the most important asset. Not the preserved hardware or the one cheaply purchased from abroad.

Which is a simple fact of nuclear military technology. A fact which is totally contradictory of the doctrinnaire idealogues who think "stockpiling of hardware" is sufficient.

[GOPJ]

My former project is keeping the irons hot with a reduced staff, reduced budget and a controlled maintenance process. The code jockeys are keeping the software maintained.

Funding has to happen...

[Myrddin]

So it mean that people are the most important asset. Not the preserved hardware or the one cheaply purchased from abroad.

Yes. That is true of most technologies. The key asset is the intellectual capacity of the creative people who invent and perfect the ideas. Manufacture of hardware is the final step before deployment. Same for software.

Looking back in history, the druids refused to write down information. It was always passed along from teacher to student. When the Romans herded the druids onto the Isle of Anglesey and killed them all, the civilization was essentially wiped off the face of the earth.

As I pointed out before, the school books are full of the fundamental theories necessary to prime a bright student into a state of readiness. Learning about the real world implementations and pitfalls is a consequence of experience working in the field. If the old hands with the practical knowledge pass on before sharing their knowledge with the next generation of bright graduates, the real world knowledge of that body of technology will die with them. We will have to start from first principles again and spend the money to rediscover the knowledge that went to the grave.

Nikola Tesla was brilliant theorist and electrical engineer. Where are his followers today? Much of what he conceived lies stagnant on bookshelves.

[Myrddin]

Funding has to happen...

The financial impacts of the Senate immigration bill aren't going to help the financial picture. I'm not betting my future on any money showing up. Like most of my former colleagues, I'll stick with the new lines of business in a commercial world that wants to pay for good technology.

[BeHoldAPaleHorse]

Russia has mobile ICBM's, why can't we?

We do. They're called "SLBMs."

[BeHoldAPaleHorse]

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

Vladimir Rezun's riff on that infamous quote from Khrushchev comes to mind.

[Herakles]

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

I got news for you; from time to time I hang out at the Nuclear Engineering department at a local university, and we are training everyone's nukes. I've been successful in persuading a couple Chinese to stay in the US, hoping that would be a win win for us (I try to do my part).

But at the same time I can't fault the Universities. In an attempt to prevent going out of business after the government destroyed the commercial nuke industry, the nuke departments had to get warm bodies to fill the seats from anywhere. US students did not want any part of that industry.

By the way, do you remember those nukes Pakistan and India developed?

There are two sayings in my business;

1. Pay me now or pay me later.

2. What goes around comes around.

The time is now later and it is coming around.

[Herakles]

"I suspect that they also tell their kids (and friends kids) to NOT GO THERE as well "

I have discouraged every young person who was not already in a nuclear program not to do it - and so have many of my friends and their friends.

The only purpose of this democracy is to produce a victim class, film stars, and trial lawyers with superior living standards and superior rights. But when the blozack hits the spinning quidork, they always explain how people like me should do it for nothing to protect their way of life.

I would like to leave them with one thought; "He who has least to gain has least to lose"!

[BeHoldAPaleHorse]

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.

Well, if nothing else, this idea is ambitiously wasteful. This strategy will end up in a bunch of nonproductive assets suddenly being labeled "defense industrial infrastructure" and getting listed as a tax break, until the tax holiday expires, whereupon a lot of those facilities will disappear into the night--and we still wouldn't have actually produced any hardware in the meantime.

As bad as the black budget got in the 1980s with lack of fiscal controls and procurement officials playing favorites with vendors, your plan would be far worse. I was there for that; suffice it to say that there are a number of well-heeled retired GS-12s and O-6s out there who made their fortune at SDIO, Air Force Space & Missiles Command, and NAVAIRSYSCOM, and delivered exactly nothing in terms of operational hardware. Your plan would be (much) more of the same.

War preparations must commence immediately for the inevitable (and, actually, winnable) Third World War.

We're fighting the Third World War right now. We're not going to be fighting the war you're thinking of, though.

Great power warfare to the final victory is obsolete because the mobilization price tag ends up cratering anyone's economy--it involves buying a bunch of assets that add exactly nothing to one's economic base.

Someone in the CIA ran a detailed economic analysis in the 1970s. They found that a large-scale conventional war (on the scale of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe and a Soviet drive to the Persian Gulf) would bankrupt the United States and the Western Allies in less than six months.

Well, this analyst scratched his head, puzzled. Something wasn't adding up. So he ran the same numbers for the Warsaw Pact countries. He found that the Warsaw Pact states were already teetering on the ragged edge of bankruptcy because of their oversized military forces.

The CIA terminated his consulting contract, because his analysis contradicted what the CIA's inhouse people were saying about how wonderful the Soviet economy was.

Care to guess who was right?