Japanese Officials Complain as US Admits to New Nuke Test

reply to post by alienreality


Never even thought of that. I totally forgot this clown got a peace prize, and here he is testing wmd's for their capability and readiness...

I'm really surprised - the journalists in the link (and I read the sublinks too) missed the entire thing.

Sure, it's a sub-crit test. We also do non-crit tests a lot - you see them at different facilities, I recall maybe two years ago Sandia was running some in the midwest. Generally if you hear a ruckus about Sandia or LANL "blowing up DEPLETED URANIUM!!" what you're seeing is a test of the compression structure of a new nuke design.

In this case, (and the sub crit test in question) those hydrodynamics non-critical tests that Sandia was running on DU loads and this peanut shot were part of a design test for Sandia's new "no maintenance" nuke design. You'll see more of that regularly over the next couple of years - Sandia won the design contract in a contest with LANL about 5-6 years ago.

The point is to design a weapon with no tritium boost system and no tritium-containing initiation devices that need no field maintenance for years at a time. Also, there were a lot of new technologies that had come up since the last big weapon design effort, and it makes possible a LOT of new tricks, and those all have to be tested as well, ground up, start to finish, from new explosive lensing to the initiator technology.