From the Scotish Sunday Herald:
PLANS TO refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.
The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. ….
Neither the NNSA nor the UK Ministry of Defence would say anything about the nature or function of Fogbank. But it is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear bomb. US officials have said that manufacturing the material requires a solvent cleaning agent which is “extremely flammable” and “explosive”. The process also involves dealing with “toxic materials” hazardous to workers.
I wish I could say this sort of thing was rare, but it’s disturbingly common. I’ve seen it multiple times in my own career. My favorite incident occured one day when I was sitting bored out of my mind in my cubicle at ATK , and the phone rang. It was someone from elsewhere on the plant; they were having a problem with a coating for some igniter components for a rocket program that ATK inherited from United Tech, when United Tech went under in 2004. The instructions to make the coating came with the rocket, but no matter what they did, the techs couldn’t actually make the stuff. By this point, United Tech near San Jose had been abandoned, and the buildings bulldozed. There was nobody there to ask anymore. But someone found that I had worked there, so they called me up in hopes that I might have been in touch with a former co-worker who knew something, *anything,* about this particular program. When they explained the coating issue to me, they had to wait a minute or so for me to stop laughing.
As it happens, *I* was the one who had cooked up that coating at Untied Tech. I was one of two guys working this issue there; it was the other fellers program, I was providing assistance. Shortly after we got the coating to work, he left United Tech. And apparently he left before all the paperwork could be updated. So the techs at ATK knew what most (but not all) of the ingredients for the coating were, but not the manufacturing process. And there were a grand total of two people on the entire friggen’ planet who could tell them how to fix it. And through sheer dumb luck, they managed to find one of them right off the bat. But if I hadn’t worked there, or if nobody had thought to call me, Odin only knows how many taxpayer-funded manhours would have been blown trying to figure out how to make a coating that this other feller and I whipped up in about 15 minutes.
Heh.
Good luck with “Fogbank.”
So I publish APR and sell aerospace documents, in no small part to help make sure that not all this knowledge is lost.
