[UPDATED] Who hid the recipe?
Every organization has had it happen. For whatever reason – the one person who “knows” how things works leaves the organization and there were certain things that only that person knew how to do.
That’s fine when you are dealing with a store or consulting business – but how about the assembly of a nuclear warhead?
That’s what has happened w/ the warhead for the US Trident submarine launched ballistic missile. The Sunday Herald recently reported that the UK Trident modernization plan is threatened with costly delays because no one in the US weapons plants knows how to make a hazardous material code named ‘Fogbank.’
I remember seeing articles over the last couple of years talk about how all of the bomb designers at Los Alamos were nearing retirement and there was concern over who would be left to build the bombs when they left. I guess we know the answer to that question now….
But you have to wonder – if this lack of knowledge was an unspoken reason why the previous Administration had been pushing a new warhead design (the Reliable Replacement Warhead) so strongly.
[Update, March 11] And talking about developing nuclear warheads – take a look at this ScientificAmerican article about ‘Advances in Monitoring Nuclear Weapons Testing‘ (the article’s authors claim that any test of at least 1 kt would be detectable, and in some parts of the world – even below 1 kt).
