They told us to "please ignore" the voice of the employee survey

I completely believe that based on what I know about up there. Wondered how the new campus was shaping up though. Has to be better than the old place

May be newer, but I'll never understand why they went to LESS square footage.

Now they are expanding again because it was not enough.

MBA's thought they knew better.
Probably because the fewer cleared square feet, they got a bonus or something.

I thought the uncleared manufacturing center was a smart idea though

Unfortunately the uncleared area is where they send the worst managers/mentors, and results in poor/pointless training before people make it over to the main plant.

Good idea on paper, but as per Honeywell they find a way to make it bad.

For some it can help though, varies by position.

thought I'd browse their front page. ahh, look at all the pink haired multisexed peeeople

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I wished I could tell why I completely understand this sentiment.

And, it's true. You can't reason with them, especially the engineers

WISH it looked anything like that lmao.

Atleast alot of the rules made by those guys are still in place.

I believe in The Curve of Binding Energy, theres a story of SEALS being tasked to test either a nuclear weapons or materials facility.

Stuff is heavy, so they steal a bunch of shopping carts from the local walmart to facilitate the heist...

Been awhile since I read it.

There are even disagreements between DoD and DoE on what is and what isn't.

I was working the support for B61-11 flight test in the mid 90s, and we had a test drop up at Thermometer Lake at Tonopah, on Sandia's instrumented target, from a B-2 from Edwards. At the time, the whole thing was a Special Access Required event on the USAF side.

A week or two after the drop I was thumbing through Aviation Week at a Barnes and Noble in Vegas and *floored* to see this unclass photo of the event that had been released by DoE! When I went to work with the magazine, my unit commander shrugged his shoulders and laughed, and my DoE liaison in the squadron laughed as well.
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I wonder if it was from that exercise. I recall seeing similarly a SEAL team with 3 or 4 guys picking up a B57 in the wheeled cradle and shoving it in the bed of a HMMWV.

This particular exercise isn't the only time DoE has done this sort of thing, so it wouldn't surprise me. In my time around this area, DoE TSD (now Office of Secure Transportation) was legitimately interested in testing and improving their security and transport, and wasn't shy of using "the experts" to see how different minds tried to get over/under/through various security measures.

I'm pretty sure I got a copy of that photo as a gift during a visit to an airport in Oregon (Florence maybe?) Sometime around 1999.

Lost said photo awhile ago though. If I still had it I would probably ask if you could sign it.

Comparisons will be difficult if there is no testing.  

Trust a .gov agency at their word? That's how moon landings get faked!

Don't forget Fair Trade

Lima Xray said before they had to replace the fuel on the missiles he babysat. Why? The current fuel was harmful to the environment. Harmful to the environment on an ICBM nuclear missile.
So you may be right.

But had YOU taken that photo, and put it on your social media....

The worst part is when Energy declassifies something, then all us speculators find it, then they go oh shit, and reclassify it. NC/ND says they can't say it's now SRD, so we all may be in possession of information that we have no access or need to know. Like a ticking time bomb.

Or, you can just patchwork quilt two or three U/U docs together, and now you have CFRD. (Shrugs) Keeps the people that paid for it out, but everybody else walked that shit out as fast as they invented it.

That's another thing. Unclassified isn't.

I found a pic

Yeah thats a fun book.

BB-Stacker In Charge then? Or do the guys that handle tactical weapons get called that?

You can’t really compare Iraq and NK in terms of geopolitical goals and policy, can you? Iraq was more about protecting the petro-dollar than concerns about chemical and biological weapons and giving us a reason to be in the Middle East for the next 50 years. NK offers nothing in terms of protecting our stature in the globe-and nobody is going to fuck with NK because China won’t allow a former NK that isn’t a buffer state.

Yep, that’s what I meant when I included Maintenance in my post.

ETA: I’d be curious to know what the replacement timetable is (don’t answer if you can’t) because the weapons are losing some tritium all of the time. I wouldn’t be surprised to know that the weapons would function as designed with a well expired bottle. I don’t know enough about pit design and the bottle pressures/injection time involved but it could be that it wouldn’t matter a lot?

The elite have been building bunkers and who knows what the military has been doing underground. There will be one variety of human left, and they will be similar in life and behavior to roaches.

And this will only serve as a pork project- there will be nothing left of this by the time they are predicting.

Now I also suspect that there is a plan b between 40 year old nukes and these. I would guess something much better and customizable damage than nuclear tech and that they are saving it up for any peasants that dare step out of line.

I think because of the relatively small amount it’s really not much of a human health hazard unless burned and inhaled. (I’m about 3 miles from the Trijicon plant, and have wondered how much they keep on hand and how secure it is in terms of nuclear attack, tornado etc.

Tritium half life is 12 years, it's not complicated to make a reasonable guess.

ETA

Very doubtful.

The quest for miniaturization and efficiency gave us small primaries with minimum amounts of fissionable material that require tritium boosting to get a good reaction. A likely situation is that warheads with variable yield have that yield set by varying the amount of boosting gas, as lowering the reaction enough in the primary would cause the secondary to fail to light. And/or the secondary itself may require boosting in the sparkplug to get a good burn. Nuclear weapons are both simple and exceptionally complex... the concepts behind the parts are pretty straightforward. But the details of exactly how much of this and that and dimensions and everything are excruciatingly demanding, especially when the designers tried to be oh-so-clever in making everything as small as possible.

What a curious thing to say...LOL.
Not too long ago, I found a set of Army field manuals on the physical security requirements for "specials" at the local surplus store. Any Army MPs reading this thread will recognize the locations of Fischbach, Miesau Army Depot and others where these weapons were stored. There were also numerous forward deployed areas all over Germany back then and MP's guarded them. And provided road security when they were transported. As I recall, those manuals were classified. No longer, apparently as these were clearly marked unclassified. But the material within still referenced specific security measures within the actual storage areas that I know were classified back when I was in. Curious.

One of my collateral duties my first European tour was on the survey team for nuclear, biological, chemical. (I managed to avoid such irritations on subsequent tours, LOL) They sent us to a school and we worked with dilluted live agents. Yeah. Diluted Soman, Tabun, etc so the test kits would react correctly. The nuclear part, they had a "kit" which was a paint can-size lead pig that held small lead fobs of isotopes.These they would place in the training area and we would have to find using a survey meter.

Interestingly, later on when I was with the Sheriff's Office back home they sent me to the County school for the same thing because our county is home to one of the largest nuclear generating plants and the SO, being on the list for primary responders for evacuation/survey personnel. They used the same isotope kit but we had the yellow CD meters. LOL. Later on, after civil defense wasn't a thing, it became a thing again when the GWOT came round and people wondered which set was going to try us next, the man-jam wearing types, norks or some other set LOL. Basically, even with SALT, SALTII and other "treaties" your chances of getting nuked these days is reduced but never, zero. So we got new survey meters and more training. But I'm retired now. I have a NO Nukes sign in the yard outlined in bricks in large enough font to be readable by satellite so my neighborhood is safe. LOL.
Anyway

My first text which I had to sign for at the Post library was Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Glasstone & Dolan 1977. There's a 1979 edition and I see the DOD has a 2021 version. Haven't got that one yet. I know now that the info in the original books was based on data from, among others, Upshot-Knothole, Teapot, Plumbob tests at the NTS thanks to the fifty year declass. I study this subject because I'm the curious type and I find it interesting. During the "survivalist" heyday of the 80's there were a number of text put out on nuclear by sketchy people and not so sketchy people. Mostly, the greenie's and peaceniks screamed werallgonnadiiiieeeee fifty times. Which is BS. On the Beach was just a movie. Bing Crosby taking a cyanide pill while sitting in his favorite roadster in his garage...silly, man. Best defense against a nuke? Don't F'n BE there when the canned sunshine alights. Even if you're close, if it didn't fry you or blow you through a building or something, you may (or may not have) gotten too many REMs and you at least got a fighting chance. If you keep your wits about you and have some idea of the risks and a way to detect radiation/fallout.

I've found this thread to be very intriguing. Personally, having spent a good portion of my adult life working for "Duh Gubbermint", I have little faith that they won't screw this up and probably already have. Tom Clancy. Hunt For Red October, Sum of All Fears. For those who've read them, you know why. Both dealt with sensitive things that we've talked about here but back then there wasn't much of an internet. When Sum of All Fears came out, by the time I got around to reading it, tritium night sights were becoming a thing and when I got to the part in the book about (I think it's called) "boosted fission devices" and why the one they used in Baltimore fizzled I had to look that up because I wanted to understand the why. So then I understood decay, (tritium offgasses Helium-3) and why that is a bad thing. And why Trijicon/Meprolight asks you to send them your "dead" sights, LOL. When I was a full time working gunsmith, every so often I'd take the nice full bag of dead ones I'd replaced on people's pistols and such and sent it off to them.
Anyway

I AM, however, solidly impressed by the detailed knowledge possessed by some of my fellow Arfcommers. Who knew. One can only hope that in the industry this thread is about, that there are still fine people like y'all working to make sure these weapons systems function as designed when they're needed to. While I understand the nature of the testing they are using today, I also have a rudimentary working-man's knowledge of the physics involved it seems pretty silly that they would literally bet the farm on something they can "calculate" but not really test. Especially when underground testing is a good alternative. Or, if the device is small enough, an airburst produces no fallout...hmmm. what's not to like? LOL When it's obvious that the other signatories consider those treaties well, you know. I think it's incredibly naive of us.
One would Hope.
God Bless

I'm pretty sure Trijicon is just importing little sealed glass vials of tritium made by MB Microtec in Switzerland; they are the Inventor and source of most (possibly all?) tritium illumination vials.

https://mbmicrotec.com/en



These are the storage containers they use / offer for transport.

https://mbmicrotec.com/en/product-services/rental-of-typ-b-u-containers

I wouldn't be too worried.

Shopping carts. LOL.
One of those stories was detailed in a book, Red Cell I think it was by Richard Marcinko. Vietnam-era SEAL, was the plank owner commander of SEAL Team-6. Then he went on to a group known as Red Cell whose mission was to test Naval security at places like China Lake. Norfolk I think was another that his people gained access to parts of those facilities they weren't supposed to. Much embarrassment on the parts of the commanders who's facilities that were penetrated. (apparently, overpowering the watch on an in-port nuclear sub and being in parts of the Boat they weren't cleared for was more than just an oopsie LOL. That got him the microscope treatment from above and eventually retired, was prosecuted and sent to Club Fed, wrote a number of "fiction" books. Good reads.

Yes, the miniaturization is easier said than done.

This....
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.... to this:
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.... or this:
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That's a 200kt thermonuclear warhead with 10 times the yield as the WWII Gadget/Fat Man bomb. There's an atomic bomb primary and a separate fusion secondary inside that can.

I wonder if we will soon reach (or maybe already have?) a point where precision guided conventional weapons could be a more reliable way to service many nuclear targets rather than depend on untested nuclear warhead designs.  Obviously, no conventional weapon could do a whole airfield or such the way a 100kt+ bomb can, but a direct hit on a silo door with even a purely kinetic weapon should still do the trick at ICBM speeds, right?

On tritium:
1 - Don't sweat what's in a gunsight.
2 - it doesn't really leak. The containers for only gram amounts are in big fucking nut shaped containers:
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The reason for it to be replaced with other certain items in a group x / LLC exchange is it ages out. Those timetables are super seeecret. It is because if you knew how often a particular system required it, you could potentially math your way back to how much is in that container, and then you could make some reasonable estimates as to what parts of the weapon may be utilizing it, and then yield.

They also worry about shipping, because you might be able to discern shipping timetables, but I bet money there are plenty of systems and components, so it's not like half the missile field goes black at the same time. Right? And, they have DIAMONDS, so they wouldn't down so many gravity systems, and naval assets and the missile field at the same time they cripple SIOP, right? Right?

I don't know.

I agree completely with his lower half speculations. He is more eloquent and succinct that I could ever strive to be.

I'll piggy back on, I am feeling a little talkative, feel free to skip:

There's a thing called design margins. You can literally take certain amounts of certain materials, put one piece on a forklift, and dump it on another piece from a certain height, and get a probable yield.

Even if it is a .5kT 'fizzle', thats FIVE HUNDRED TONS OF TNT EQUIVALENT. (check my math, but I am on a roll)

That's a very conservative design yield.

When you make a bomb to be a bomb, you can have some super conservative margins (my reading tells me that a common cure to below-rated shots was to plus up the plutonium).

When you make a bomb for production, to meet certain terminal effects in any weather conditions, to hold specific targets at risk... now you have to start making tradeoffs. Size and shape are the first, weight is the second. If weight is no issue, neither is the design, honestly. The third is yield.

Pick two.

In the US, they pick shape then yield. Then they made missiles bigger to account for weight. There are three types of nuclear weapons. Gun assembled, spherically imploded assembly and non-spherically imploded assembly. Then you can gild any of those lillies, improving the yield or enhancing desired outputs or effects by adding elements to the design.

The most difficult from an engineering standpoint are non-spherical systems. They tax even modern computing codes. But they result in artillery shells and in small snowcone-shaped weapons.

In the most cutting edge systems, you give up efficiency, and you give up on rad safety. You also give up on maximum yield. That's why the 53 could be a heifer. Conversely...

I say all that to say that's why I say I really am queasy about modern weapons. They have to be using very very thin shells of active material in them. Those shells are eroding due to the fact that this is what the material does. When you erode a fat pit like some of the second gen composite systems, there is still plenty of meat left in the nuclear explosive package to make up for it. When you have pockets of trapped helium gas in a boundary layer millimeters thick, and that pocket pops a flake of pu up into the plating, you have introduced a Taylor instability.

You can have a certain amount and still get good yield according to People Who Math. But that is not in a razor thin margin design. The brilliant ones what made these designs accounted for this by also saying the system needed torn completely down and refreshed on a pretty short timeline.

So, the russians fucked us by having the greenies get rocky flats shut down, and letting all the geniuses that figured out how to beat those things into intricate shapes be shit on and told they were killing the environment and going home and dying of cancer and the USG swears it wasn't their stuff doing it and they had to fight for basic medical care and... sorry. Off topic. No new replacements, those are mostly running on the original pits from the mid 90's or some ones the DAF cobbled together. Do they work? They don't know. I hope they lied, used what they knew about hiding underground tests / detecting fake tests and shot their frankenprimary against the law anyway. Put me on their jury.

...

Now, you start stacking tolerances. The conventional HE in the initiating system that is getting neutron baked 24/7 for years. The kapton-wrapped flat cabling that is thermally warm from the pit. The neutron generators that are getting weaker over time. And, now the gas bottles, even with super high purity, overfilling and a filter system to keep contaminates that would affect fusion burn out...

But, the People That Know say they did the math and some tests where they dynamically shocked tiny parts of the weapon configuration, and They Say it's Fine.

I don't know what I don't know. I also don't know too much about this topic. So, take what I say with a salt mine of confidence.

Cool! I have a bunch of WSA photos, and I collect books people wrote about their times there. Got anything good on the system that dropped concertina wire on you then gassed you just for insult lol



Thank you for doing that. I was just trained to hide under my desk mostly. (In 1985 at 15 I was certified as a shelter monitor and one of the few Tennessee aerial radiological monitors).

It had to be terrifying to be in Germany and attached in any way to a special unit. Rolled up by the germans, or whatever those russians in the cars were called that buzzed around you guys. It doesn't shock me to hear about the drug use; being isolated, every time a message came in you thought the balloon was going up, people trying to elicit or straight turn you, then people who actually hand carried stuff over to the Bad Guys. Plus constant field rotations and then NSI's and... trying to raise a family. whew






There are revisions because they shit when he released the first one. If you go to certain sites, you can find all the revisions and see what they worried about. You need some of the earlier ones.






You need to look for the DNA EM-1 series.




I agree. There are a bunch of them on here. I always appreciate whatever they can post.

Yeah or not. it actually happened really rapidly in the US at least. You should read about ol Ted sometime.

What a shame it would be if that link got posted

Who is the next Edward Teller?

Probably in a university somewhere figuring out how to put some chemical into the atmosphere to destroy agriculture and kill all human life "stop global warming".

We don't need another Teller.

Another Theodore Taylor would be better, but pointless as there's really no outlet for their talents. Not much of a job market for nuclear weapons designer these days, unless you go to Iran.

Thank you for the complements. Jost doing my job. Funny, when I enlisted, the thought of fighting a war in a nuclear environment wasn't something I even thought about at first. In the beginning, the collateral duties took away from what I saw as my main job but the new man is the low man on the totem pole, gets all the shit details LOL. We had "alerts" all the time. Some were scheduled that we knew about but we weren't allowed to "get ready". Others were unannounced. Those usually came from Division or higher. Some we loaded the vehicles with everything but weapons and "classified" and lined up ready to convoy out. Then we got to put everything back LOL. Other times we deployed to specific jobs; traffic control points, security for various sensitive installations or large interchanges on the Autobahn system where we were to facilitate convoys coming from all different directions or, (demo. <--this I learned about later, when I learned what a SADM was and what 10th SF did back then in USAREUR in addition to their "Other" missions. LOL) Twice those alerts were the "real thing" but accidents. Like the time NORAD thought there were ICBM's inbound but they had some sort of technical glitch. They interrupted my movie at the Post Theater, told us it was a theater-wide alert, not a drill. When I got back to the Company area they had a Deuce backed up to the Orderly room and some guys were heaving that big bastard classified safe out the window into the truck. We took all our weapons and ammo too, out to the woods we went LOL.

The Soviet units you referred to were Army mostly, not all wore their proper uniform tabs (obviously missing) because they were probably GRU or something. They were required to stay in specific areas and drove vehicles with special plates. Not all had diplomatic immunity. Soviet Military Liaison Mission. Pronounced "Smell'em" LOL. We were specifically ordered NOT to shoot them. We could chase them or roadblock them, but anything physical to stop them other than boxing them in (luck with that LOL) was a big-ass no-no. Like I'm gonna ram a Mercedes sedan with my jeep, LOL. I was stationed near Nurnberg which was a closed city to them but we got reports of the bastards taking pictures all the time. Only got close enough to see one once. Mostly they were gone before we got there.

We all knew if they came through the Fulda Gap, that would be preceded by chemical/nuclear attacks by IRBM/artillery or aircraft. Flight time from the East was way under ten minutes and even with a damn radar set on every silly little hill, we figured at best we'd get two minutes warning of the canned sunshine or the yellow rain. It's not something we dwelled on, actually. We practiced all the time with our chemical suits and masks, nothing for radiation but they worked for fallout. Sucks running the mile &1/2 in a charcoal rubber suit wearing a gas mask when you're hung over from partying at the Nashville Club the previous night, LOL. Inside our barracks/company area we had more or less immediate access to our gear and inside, we'd probably able to get suited up before the bad stuff got to us. Probably. If you were at the motor pool or PX....run and hold your breath? LOL.

At the time, Europe was an "Accompanied Tour" so families were A-ok. We were told that in case of hostilities there were plans to evac them to safe(er?) areas or CONUS but most of us felt that was BS. Yeah. We suspected/knew our superiors lied to us about certain things even then, LOL. There were also women in the Army back then. For a long time, actually. In forward areas even. Doing jobs that would in fact, put them in actual combat if war was to break out. Like Military Police LOL. Around 1980-something, we got a replacement fresh from Basic/AIT training. A bunch of us had gone downtown for a day of sightseeing/bar-hopping. We'd just come off one of those "maybe it was for real" alerts and little blondie chimes in that they told her back during Basic that if that happened, all the women in units went back with the dependents. We of course straightened her out and assured her we'd watch out for her so she would get to shoot Russians with the rest of us. If we lived long enough, that is. LOL.

Back then, women weren't allowed to serve in "combat units". No infantry, no artillery, special forces. But they could be MP's, (which isn't a rear area job) or supply driving trucks (to the front?) or being a cook, supply, clerk, etc assigned to an MP, Infantry, Artillery or other frontline unit. Of course after years of pretending they didn't know, our fearless leaders dropped the facade, and we have the policies which guide us today.

I never worked in a storage facility. Luck of the draw, LOL. It's my understanding that they had things like concertina wire that dropped from the roof or gas which wouldn't have necessarily been a nerve agent or the like. But I wouldn't be surprised, as those areas could have been secured in such a way that the area was sealed (no two doors open at the same time) something like that. On YouTube, one search for 'Minuteman Missile Transporter' will bring up some videos of how they move those. Entertaining.

I learned a long time ago, one does not fuck with the Sky Cops. Those entrusted with the security of certain weapons systems at USAF bases tend to take their jobs seriously. As it should be. On one trip back from Europe, Space available on a C-141 we were diverted to some USAF base due to weather and the need to refuel or some other stupid Air Force shit, LOL. They never told us where we were, LOL. On the ground they bussed us in this old blue school bus to a doublewide trailer with half empty vending machines that hadn't been filled since oh, 1972? LOL. No bathrooms. DON'T go wandering. If you "wander" (they were specific about this) into the alert area (look for the red-hash line painted on the concrete) the SP's (Sky Cops, LOL) will face plant you on the concrete and you'll miss your flight. And the next couple ones. Nobody wandered. It wasn't hard to figure what they were guarding in those hangers...only one reason for all the armed SP's LOL.

Thank you!

I love hearing those stories!



I was looking for an image of a system when I found a prop for a US tv show. Focus on the left side, anything look familiar?

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guess the norks watch our shows, too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_Prompt_Strike

"Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS), formerly called Prompt Global Strike (PGS), is a United States military effort to develop a system that can deliver a precision-guided conventional weapon strike anywhere in the world within one hour, in a similar manner to a nuclear ICBM.[1][2] Such a weapon would allow the United States to respond far more swiftly to rapidly emerging threats than is possible with conventional forces. A CPS system could also be useful during a nuclear conflict, potentially replacing the use of nuclear weapons against up to 30% of targets."