5 Unsolved Nuclear Mysteries скачать в хорошем качестве

5 Unsolved Nuclear Mysteries

In US Military History, its nuclear arsenal recipes have always remained the most secretive and less officially known weapons. Although most of the nuclear warheads are physically identified by the public, very few know their real capabilities, and more importantly, what they are made of. Such was the case of one Cold War-era missile component that gained public attention in 2007 when the US Navy endeavored to refurbish and modernize its W76 warheads, the nuclear payload atop Trident II missiles carried by submarines. The Navy discovered an essential but classified material of the W76 warhead, and nobody knew what it was. It was code-named fogbank, and that was it. No person in active duty knew how it functioned or what it did. Technicians described it as a lookalike to either Styrofoam or aerogel, but its functions remained unknown. When the Navy set out to investigate, it was discovered that fogbank was initially produced at a secure military facility known as the Y-12 Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1970s and 1980s during the Cold War era Arms Race between the US and the USSR. The little intel found specified that fogbank's materials and composition and the method of creation were entirely classified. Given this, the few documents available to the military on fogbank's production were almost useless. To make matters worse, the engineers that probably developed it were either retired or dead. It took the Pentagon two separate attempts and nearly 100 million dollars to successfully recreate the highly confidential material. In 2002, then NNSA director Thomas D'Agostino told members of the House of Representatives (QUOTE): "There is a material that we currently use, and it's in a facility that we built at Y-12. It's a very complicated material that we call it the fogbank… it's a material that's very important to, you know, our W76 life extension activity... It's called interstage material, but the chemical details, of course, are classified." While the military will not confirm the allegations, experts believe that, according to what D'Agostino's said related to fogbank, it sits between the primary and secondary stages of a two-stage thermonuclear weapon and transfers energy between the fission and fusion portions. Experts also believe it is likely an aerogel that belongs to the category of ultralight gels, in which the standard liquid components are substituted by gas. Jeffrey Lewis, a missile and nuclear weaponry from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said in 2008 that fogbank might be a result of nicknames associated with aerogels, such as frozen smoke or San Franciso fog.