Posted on 03/10/2009 3:30:09 PM PDT by MyTwoCopperCoins
It was a chink in the armour that could have proved US dear. America’s nuclear-warhead upgrade was delayed as government laboratories forgot how to make crucial components.
The Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration had to wait more than a year to refurbish aging nuclear warheads, a government report states.
Regarding a classified material codenamed ‘Fogbank’, a Government Accountability Office report released this month states that “NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency”, Fox News reported on Tuesday.
So the effort to refurbish and upgrade W76 warheads, which top the US navy’s (and the British Royal Navy’s) submarine-launched Trident missiles, had to be put on hold while experts scoured old records and finally figured out how to manufacture the stuff once again. According to the Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, Fogbank is “thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb.”
The National Nuclear Security Administration is a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy. It is responsible for the manufacture and upkeep of the nation’s nuclear weapons.
A new facility was built at the Y-12 National Security Complex near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to begin production of Fogbank once again, but was delayed by poor planning, cost overruns and an failed effort to find an alternative to Fogbank.
“The navy originally planned to start replacing old W76 warheads with refurbished ones on submarines in April 2008,” Fox News quotes the report as saying. The first refurbished W76 warhead was delivered to the navy last month, according to an NNSA press release.
Why am I tempted to point and say “Ha, ha!”?
This sort of thing is just going to become more common in our ever more complicated world, I think. One of my worries with designing new nuclear weapons only with computer models is that the model will become a sort of “black box” that we use, but don’t really understand.
Couldn’t they have just called Russia, China, or any of a dozen other countries for the repair manual?
No problem. Obama can just ask the Iranians.
You mean, like that automated diagnosis machine in Idiocracy? Heheheh!
Local content (FOX News)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2203115/posts
What about that Pakistani dude they just let free ... from his house.
Yep, the Clinton-era promotion and hiring freezes and military laboratory consolidations/BRACs resulted in a major brain drain within the military RDT&E community, and a “knowledge gap” in weapons design and manufacture that is biting the U.S. in the arse right now.
Don’t worry - the Chinese have good back-up copies of all the documents.
I’m from the government and I’m here to protect you.
I beleive the answer lies within the title.
They can't help you, they are all tied up responding to 911 calls over chicken nuggets at McDonalds
Did you save any of the info under your mattress?
[Mr] T
“Don’t worry - the Chinese have good back-up copies of all the documents.”
Courtesy of Clinton appointee, Hazel O’Leary.
Read up on her if you dare. You’ll be afraid, very, very afraid.
They could just buy some plans back from the Chinese.
I absolutely do not believe this. There is no way this is as is being presented.
That’s nothin! Wait ‘till after Obama gets rid of the rest of our weapons systems.
This has already occurred for most people with the toaster.
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