
Vintage electronics for verified dismantlement of nuclear weapons (2019) - rbanffy
https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1616454-vintage-electronics-trusted-radiation-measurements-verified-dismantlement-nuclear-weapons
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cantrevealname
I'm trying to understand how this solves the trust problem. Let's suppose the
Americans are visiting Russia to inspect some Russian weapons as part of a
treaty. The Americans show up with their detectors built around the 6502
processor. Even though it's allegedly a simple design, are the Russians going
to trust that the Americans haven't hidden something more sophisticated inside
the 6502's DIP package to collect more info than they're supposed to? If you
have an unlimited budget, you could manufacture something that looks just like
a vintage 6502, but has lots of secret capability inside.

The same problem exists if the Russian's supply the detectors to the
Americans. Will the Americans trust that the Russians haven't created a 6502
package that's capable of cheating the test?

I'm imagining a possible solution as follows: The Americans go to Russia with
5 identical detection systems. The Russians randomly choose 4 systems to
destructively analyze (X-ray or decapsulation of 6502, etc.). When the
Russians are satisfied that the 6502 is real and isn't hiding any extra
features in any of the 4 systems they test, the Americans are allowed to
proceed with the inspection using their one remaining detection system.

Is that how it's supposed to work in practice?

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madaxe_again
It would be trivial to x-ray it and verify - at the given scale and component
count, anything unwanted would be glaringly obvious. You wouldn’t even have to
just do a sample, as the time to analyse would be short, and the total number
of units finite - do all of them.

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flowersjeff
Whilst a fun idea to explore... Bit of a reach :-) LOL

There's something about that old hardware still, probably a lot of us here
fondly recall those days.

Would I seriously consider using this hardware for any mission critical
project... nah (and I know, the Dharma Initiative had great success with one
and all; still.)

