Nuclear University 2
Back in 1967, the Americans had over 32,000 nuclear devices in their weapons stock pile. Today they have about one-third that number - 10,000 nuclear warheads. 6,000 of these are big strategic megaton nukes, designed to destroy military facilities or cities anywhere in the world. Another 1,300 are smaller tactical nukes, to be used on a battle field. The remaining 2,700 are sleeping in storage. Now the big problem is that we don't know how many of the 10,000 nukes still work.
Nukes are enormously complicated. Most nukes in the American arsenal have an expected lifetime of around 10 years - yet their average age is 18 years. The United States made their last nuclear weapons back in 1992. But the USA is running out of nuke designers. In fact, in America, there are 10 times more NASA astronauts than nuclear weapons designers. By 2007, half of the nuclear weapons designers now at Los Alamos would have retired, and they will all have retired by the year 2014.
And this is why the United States government has fired up Nuclear University.
It's called TITANS, which stands for Theoretical Institute for Thermonuclear and Nuclear Studies at its Los Alamos Laboratory. By the end of 2002, their second class (of 11 students) will have graduated. TITANS is one of the most exclusive educational institutions in the entire known universe - and probably the only place you can get a degree in thermonuclear weapons.
The three entry qualifications are pretty demanding. First, you need a PhD in chemistry, physics or engineering. Second, you need an ultra-high Level Q Security Clearance, and finally you have to be employed in X division, the elite nuclear weapons design department at Los Alamos. The first two years in the class room are spent studying everything to do with nuclear weapons - their history, design, physics, computational modelling, hydrodynamics and even particle transport. The final year is spent on an individual project, such as the W80 nuclear warhead, which is designed to go onto cruise missiles.
One major problem for this new generation of nuke designers is that they won't be able to actually test their nuclear weapons. In the old days, we used to test nukes above ground, which dumped nuclear fallout from Pole to Pole. This was then followed by underground testing, which trapped practically all of the nuclear fallout. And then the testing of nuclear weapons was banned under various treaties. So the actual testing of nukes has been replaced by small-scale experiments on certain components of the nukes, and by simulations of the entire nuclear explosion on massive supercomputers.
So now that Uncle Sam's bomb plants have closed, where does that leave the decaying nukes?
Imagine that nobody is making cars any more, and let's compare a car to a nuclear weapon. Of course, a nuclear weapon is many many many times more complicated than a motor car. All the car production lines have shut down, but you know a few people who used to build gear boxes, and who still know how they work. You might find a few people here and there who know about starter motors, spark plugs and ignition coils. Unfortunately, you can't find anybody who knows about tyres, engines, or brakes - and there's no workshop manual.
The problem with maintaining the nuclear weapons arsenal, is like having to keep the car in good condition for half a century - but at no stage, are you allowed to start up the engine or drive the car.
The only people who really know how to build nuclear weapons are the people who built them, and most of them are dead or retired. The knowledge exists only in the heads of a small number of people.
Why didn't they write down their hard-won knowledge?
Firstly, because everything to do with nuclear weapons was, and still is, classified. If they wrote anything down, the engineers would then have their workload massively increased by having to do all the paperwork to classify and keep their documents secret. Secondly, there was such a rush back in the Cold War to build new and better nukes, that they were too busy to write down exactly what they had done. A typical comment would be "I have an awful lot of stuff in my head that I've never bothered to write down. Part of that is just laziness, and part of it was that it was always more fun to move onto the next thing."
So Nuclear University has been fired up to let these few remaining learned types teach the new generation of scientists how to make bombs. It's like how a parent will teach a child how to ride a bicycle with a mixture of theory, practice and verbal advice from the footpath.
At the moment, the START II Treaty which was signed in 1993, should reduce the number of American strategic nukes to around 3,000 by the end of 2009. In November 2001, Bush announced that he would further cut the number of strategic nukes to as low as 1,700 by 2012. And hopefully, the Russians would reduce their arsenal in step with the Americans.
Now this raises the question of what sort of MAD and volatile geopolitical landscape we'll end up with. We already have seven confirmed nuclear powers - the USA, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom, India and Pakistan. And we know that North Korea, Iran and Iraq would all love to have their own nukes.
But one thing is for sure, you won't get the recipe for making a nuke off the net - you'll have to go to Nuclear University. I wonder what pranks they get up to on Muck-Up Day...?
Published 27 May 2002
© 2024 Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd
