
Did America Forget How to Make the H-Bomb? (2009) - tosh
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/fogbank-america-forgot-how-make-nuclear-bombs/
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eesmith
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK)
\- "A root cause investigation showed that input materials were subject to
cleaning processes that had not existed during the original production run.
This cleaning removed a substance that generated the required impurity. With
the implicit role of this substance finally understood, the production
scientists can control output quality better than during the original run."

Cites
[https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/padwp/pdfs/nwj2_09.pdf](https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/padwp/pdfs/nwj2_09.pdf)
\- "Fogbank: Lost Knowledge Regained".

~~~
philipkglass
This can be a problem in trying to reproduce old chemistry research too, even
research published entirely in the open. You may have to do a little
historical sleuthing to determine how the materials used for research circa
1920 differ from their modern reagent grade counterparts.

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yummypaint
For all the talk about fusion energy research, much of the work done at the
national ignition facility is related to the nuclear physics end of the
"stockpile stewardship" problem. I have often heard that aside from obtaining
the material, the design challenges are mostly associated with conventional
chemical high explosives and directing the shockwave in a controlled way. On
the other hand, there is no test ban on conventional high explosives so its
surprising so few resources were allocated to that considering the billions
put into replacing nuclear testing.

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dang
Some previous discussions about Fogbank:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20115211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20115211)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15331731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15331731)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1928233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1928233)

