
FOGBANK – How USA forgot how to manufacture an essential ingredient for nukes - mmaunder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
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open_bear
This reminds me of an article where people tried to reverse-engineer a rocket
engine from the Saturn V rocket, whose manufacturing process was also lost:
[https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-
the...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-
monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/)

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avar
The article and its source notes "almost all the staff with expertise on
production had retired or left the agency", they then proceed to spend a
little short of 100 million replicating the process.

There's no mention of any attempt to simply find the people that originally
made it and asking them how it was made, since protection was halted in 1989
most of them should still be alive.

Surely that would have been more cost efficient than reverse engineering the
production process, but of course the government would have had little
incentive to save money.

So just reading between the lines this is less of a story of how the USA
"forgot" something, and more of a story of how some sprawling bureaucracy
couldn't bring itself to pick up the phone, presumably due to some combination
of information siloing, the complexities of re-granting some retirees security
clearances etc.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
It’s not a cooking recipe that you can pass on over the phone. The page also
states: “The new production scientists noticed that certain problems in
production resembled those noted by the original team”. So the new team
apparently had access to whatever knowledge had survived.

~~~
avar
To pick up the phone is a manner of speaking. I'm wondering why these former
employees seemingly weren't asked to come in as consultants, which reading
between the lines of the article wasn't the case, not this was a trivial
matter that could be entirely resolved with one phonecall.

My reading of the reference to notes is that they were following some written
material left behind by the original team, not that these were notes acquired
from ex-members of the team in 2000.

