
Forbidden Spheres - rdl
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/29/forbidden-spheres/
======
derekp7
I had a similar experience at [ a large company ] I used to work for. Had a
French Press sitting out on my desk, was quite a bit cheaper than getting
coffee in the cafeteria. Came in one morning, it was gone and had been
replaced with a nasty note from security. Coffee makers were a banned item
(due to fire hazard), so that meant that the French Press (as well as pour
overs) were also banned, as they are used to make coffee. Rumor has it that
they would also confiscate single-serve coffee pouches too.

~~~
archgoon
Makes you wonder about what they put in the coffee from the cafeteria. ;)

------
lisper
The money quote:

"Secrecy is contagious: If something is secret, and something else touches it,
it too becomes secret. Secrecy becomes a disease. Everything around the secret
issue becomes secret, so the trial became a secret, so I became a secret."

(Best read in context because it's actually a quote within a quote, but that
gets cumbersome to replicate in an HN comment.)

~~~
retox
I heard the same thing about async code...

------
david-given
I'd also encourage people to read David Langford's book, _The Leaky
Establishment_ , which is definitely not in any way based on his experiences
working at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, aka the UK's atom
bomb factory, in the 1980s; it says so right in the dedication at the front:

[http://ansible.uk/books/leaky.html](http://ansible.uk/books/leaky.html)

It tells the story of how our hero smuggles a discarded filing cabinet home
with him one day, only to discover that someone has popped a plutonium warhead
into the bottom drawer while he wasn't looking; he spends the rest of the book
trying to smuggle it back in again.

Spheres play a key role.

------
IgorPartola
I am not sure if it's secrecy or safety. Tr sorry about the orange aside, it
seems the concern is less about whether an outsider would see a sphere and
know that it is cricitcal to the design, and more that a scientist might leave
an important model or an actual plutonium put out where it shouldn't be, and
now only another scientist can tell that it's out of place. Seems reasonable
to say "anything that looks like a plutonium pit should stay locked up or an
alarm should be raised."

------
mseebach
The application to spheres and the possibly apocryphal story of the orange is
bordering on the absurd, and is amusing, for sure. But the prospect of having
the Soviets pull ahead in the nuclear race kind of put a damper on people's
sense of humour in those days.

But that said, these policies are about eliminating the grey zones enabled by
imperfect and inconsistent application of human judgement, and are alive and
well today in practically every organisation that even vaguely deals with
sensitive material: The clean desk policy. Because sensitive material would be
written on paper, any paper is considered sensitive by default. It's obviously
entirely impractical for security staff to go through all the paper on your
desk and validate that they only contain "safe" content, and frankly, it's a
fairly high cognitive load to constantly evaluate that for yourself for every
sheet of paper. So the policy is that everything is removed at the end of the
day, and it's easy for everybody to understand.

The same again for physical security. Everybody wears their badge visibly all
the time. Yes, it's obvious that you work here, and the guard knows you and
you've said good morning to each other every day for four years, but by making
the policy apply to everybody all the time, you remove the grey zones where a
bad actor exploits a security guard's lapse in judgement: did you really leave
your badge in the pocket of your other coat, or were you just fired in the
other building? 99.99% of the time you really did forget it, but it's the
other 0.01% we have security for in the first place.

------
rdl
The interesting part for me is how individually rational decisions can have
weird consequences. The culture of secrecy infecting everything else.

Also, the conspicuous absence of spheres would tell someone that spheres are
critical to weapons design.

~~~
DigitalJack
I thought about the conspicuous absence a bit and decided I probably would not
notice the absence.

Unless I worked at a baseball factory or something where the absence truly
would be conspicuous.

~~~
justinpombrio
...unless you overheard an in-joke about how oranges are contraband.

------
akavel
Ah, so much absurd-calling in the comments here; but then, have you seen the
_certainly totally innocent_ butterfly drawings made by one bright young man
Baden-Powell? My, oh my, now those butterflies have some weird resemblance to
maps of our fortifications; but we _wouldn 't ban butterfly pictures in our
compound_, just because they resemble our secrets, that would be absurd,
wouldn't it?

[http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-founder-of-the-
boy-...](http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-founder-of-the-boy-scouts-
hid-maps-in-insect-drawings)

For me, knowing this, suddenly the article about spheres makes me much more
uncertain about who's really right here.

(That said, the comment by derekp7
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13033511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13033511))
makes a really good point of highlighting a particular aspect of legalese
creep in this context.)

------
gumby
The danger of course is that if all spheres are forbidden, their very lack can
leak the fact that they are significant to an adversary. Especially when they
are something commonplace like a sphere.

A parallel problem appeared in stealth ships (at least early ones -- somehow
the Zumwalt is supposedly stealthy too). Apparently although they didn't show
up on radar, neither did the "chop" of the waves where the ship should be.
Source: Ben Rich's book on the Skunk Works.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _something commonplace like a sphere_

How commonplace are spheres exactly? If I take a look around the office, the
closest thing that isn't a ball bearing in some chair or whatever that I would
find is an apple.

~~~
gumby
The article mentioned an orange being deemed classified once it entered the
facility, as well as ashtrays (I can guess that a closed ashtray would prevent
spills and keep air currents from moving ashes out of the ashtray, though
perhaps it was simply an esthetic thing). It wasn't remarkable to see a globe
(world maps) in those days either -- not common, but not a surprise when you
did see one). Looking around the kitchen I'm in I just see fruit and loose
tennis and lacrosse balls.

It's a no win situation for the security staff: someone could make a couple of
marks on an orange, or just use it as an aide-memoire.

------
DigitalJack
Don't tell any spherical cow jokes once you cross the line of demarcation.

~~~
proactivesvcs
You have two spherical cows. You forget to put them in your safe and within an
hour, one is taken by security and "safely detonated" and the other is
accidentally placed into a nuclear weapon, turning the weapon into a moosive
failure.

------
lucozade
> I’ve asked some contacts I have at Livermore if they had such a policy out
> there, and they said they hadn’t heard of one.

Either that or the policy is a secret and they're not allowed to tell anyone
about it.

------
ubernostrum
I wonder whether anyone ever suggested that the complete _absence_ of any
vaguely-spherical object visible on the campus would itself communicate the
importance of the spherical shape. If there's a spy who's able to see what's
left out on desks, the fact that people are being threatened for anything
visible of a certain shape is probably enough to let the spy deduce what's
going on.

------
rtpg
I think there's an interesting parallel between this and debugging. For
example, change all your test data numbers into pairs except for one. Now all
impair sums will include that number.

Though I have to say I'm a bit confused about the sphere example here. A
sphere is a sphere is a sphere right? What's the classified bit that they're
trying to hid? The exact dimensions?

~~~
JimmyAustin
AFAIK, Nuclear weapons basically revolve around creating a critical mass of
radioactive material. The issue is that a critical mass is actively trying to
push itself apart (because it's obviously exploding). So the idea is that you
get your mass, wrap it in a sphere of explosives that will detonate and keep
the critical mass contained for slightly longer, which will result in a larger
explosion.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Implosio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Implosion-
type_weapon)

~~~
ubernostrum
The implosion design is more about offering a way to turn a non-critical mass
into a critical mass on demand, since you don't want the thing going off the
instant you finish manufacturing it.

The "problem" (scare quotes because, really, something being less efficient
than it could be at wiping out a city in a single go is hard to frame as a
problem) of the bomb blowing itself apart before most of the fissile material
has a chance to undergo fission is believed to be solved by other methods.

~~~
teilo
Yes. The essential mechanism of a fission bomb is the formation of a critical
mass within ~ a millisecond's time. Form the critical mass too slowly, and you
get massive heat and radiation, but no explosion. Thus the standard
cylindrical design with half a critical mass at each end, sitting in front of
charges. Detonate both charges at once, slam the two halves together, boom.
Crude but effective.

------
qwrusz
Imagine this problem, you have a bunch of scientists, trained PhD's, suddenly
working at a top secret high security job. These are not professional military
or security folks, their previous job was most likely in a university doing
research and teaching 20 year old students.

How do you get these scientists to understand and take on the appropriate kind
of thinking and way of acting that the security risks of this job requires?
How can you be sure they get it and are paying attention to detail?

I realize to some this might feel like it's beyond common sense and going too
far. And maybe it is. But it kind of reminds me of the Van Halen contracts
where they banned brown M&M's. Of course it is not about the brown M&M's.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen#Contract_riders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen#Contract_riders)

------
bradknowles
Original article is from 2012, but still of interest.

Sigh. What next? Forbidden numbers? ;)

~~~
znmf
Forbidden numbers are indeed a thing
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_number](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_number)

