1 00:00:00,250 --> 00:00:04,770 Some things are supposed to be unforgettable: like how to ride a bike, or how to manufacture 2 00:00:04,770 --> 00:00:08,530 the interstage material in W-76 thermonuclear warheads. 3 00:00:08,530 --> 00:00:11,040 But of course, with enough time, you can forget anything. 4 00:00:11,040 --> 00:00:15,269 That’s why I fell off my bike this morning, and also why the US National Nuclear Security 5 00:00:15,269 --> 00:00:20,130 Administration had to spend eight years and 92 million dollars trying to reverse-engineer 6 00:00:20,130 --> 00:00:26,190 a material called FOGBANK… that they themselves had invented less than three decades prior. 7 00:00:26,190 --> 00:00:31,910 So, what is FOGBANK, and how did it fall into—and get yanked out of—the national memory hole? 8 00:00:31,910 --> 00:00:34,050 The short answer is a series of nuclear oopsie-doopsies. 9 00:00:34,050 --> 00:00:38,480 The long answer begins in 1975. 10 00:00:38,480 --> 00:00:39,870 Welcome to 1975! 11 00:00:39,870 --> 00:00:44,110 Ford is president, Jaws has everyone all freaked out about sharks, and Burger King just started 12 00:00:44,110 --> 00:00:45,910 selling the fish sandwich. 13 00:00:45,910 --> 00:00:46,910 Yum! 14 00:00:46,910 --> 00:00:50,149 Also, and this is a little more relevant, it’s still the Cold War, and the United 15 00:00:50,149 --> 00:00:54,079 States is cookin’ up nukes, including that W-76. 16 00:00:54,079 --> 00:01:00,100 And here, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the Y-12 complex, in Facility 9404-11, they made 17 00:01:00,100 --> 00:01:01,100 bank. 18 00:01:01,100 --> 00:01:05,750 Well, they made FOGBANK, a very important but very secret part of those payloads. 19 00:01:05,750 --> 00:01:06,790 How secret? 20 00:01:06,790 --> 00:01:08,549 Just ask their general manager. 21 00:01:08,549 --> 00:01:12,450 They finished the last of the W-76es in 1989. 22 00:01:12,450 --> 00:01:16,020 Four years after that, the facility was slated for decommissioning, and everyone who knew 23 00:01:16,020 --> 00:01:18,259 how to make FOGBANK moved on with their lives. 24 00:01:18,259 --> 00:01:22,980 Some left the agency, some retired, but what absolutely none of them did was write down 25 00:01:22,980 --> 00:01:27,250 or teach anyone else how to make this stuff, meaning that by the year 2000, FOGBANK was 26 00:01:27,250 --> 00:01:30,759 the nuclear equivalent of your grandma’s special brownie recipe that no one in the 27 00:01:30,759 --> 00:01:31,880 family can replicate. 28 00:01:31,880 --> 00:01:35,090 Though, for what it’s worth, her secret was baking it on the top rack of the oven 29 00:01:35,090 --> 00:01:38,231 for half the time, then rotating the pan 180 degrees and moving it to the bottom rack for 30 00:01:38,231 --> 00:01:39,231 the rest. 31 00:01:39,231 --> 00:01:41,100 Hey, maybe that’s how you make FOGBANK! 32 00:01:41,100 --> 00:01:42,220 Try it out and let me know. 33 00:01:42,220 --> 00:01:47,159 So it turns out that nukes, much like knowledge of how to make them, deteriorate over time. 34 00:01:47,159 --> 00:01:52,150 And in 2000, the NNSA created a plan to refurbish all those W-76es they’d built in the seventies 35 00:01:52,150 --> 00:01:55,340 and eighties so they’d last until at least 2040. 36 00:01:55,340 --> 00:01:59,159 A perfect plan, except that it required more FOGBANK and, well, you know where this is 37 00:01:59,159 --> 00:02:01,719 going: nobody knew how to make it. 38 00:02:01,719 --> 00:02:06,329 Everyone who did had either died or just forgot, and there were barely any records to go on. 39 00:02:06,329 --> 00:02:10,520 And to understand how tough—and how dangerous—it was to re-manufacture FOGBANK from scratch, 40 00:02:10,520 --> 00:02:14,560 we’re going to take a quick detour into what FOGBANK is… probably. 41 00:02:14,560 --> 00:02:19,080 For all the secrecy around FOGBANK, there’s a fair bit of consensus around what it most 42 00:02:19,080 --> 00:02:20,690 likely is and does. 43 00:02:20,690 --> 00:02:24,560 It’s assumed to be an aerogel, which is an extremely light—yet extremely strong—type 44 00:02:24,560 --> 00:02:27,989 of material nicknamed “frozen smoke” or “San Francisco fog.” 45 00:02:27,989 --> 00:02:32,520 There are a few reasons everyone suspects FOGBANK is an aerogel: its cool nickname for 46 00:02:32,520 --> 00:02:36,230 one, and for two, the fact that former-NNSA director Tom D’Agostino has mentioned that 47 00:02:36,230 --> 00:02:40,170 the compound acetonitrile—commonly used to produce aerogels—was part of the FOGBANK 48 00:02:40,170 --> 00:02:41,870 production process. 49 00:02:41,870 --> 00:02:45,220 As far as what it does, it’s understood to be an interstage between the fission and 50 00:02:45,220 --> 00:02:46,790 fusion parts of the bomb. 51 00:02:46,790 --> 00:02:51,599 Because, in simplest terms, a thermonuclear bomb works like this: there’s a conventional 52 00:02:51,599 --> 00:02:55,250 bomb here that blows up, which puts enough pressure on this fission bomb to start splitting 53 00:02:55,250 --> 00:02:59,020 atoms, so that blows up and sends out a bunch of gamma and X-rays that bounce off these 54 00:02:59,020 --> 00:03:03,040 beryllium mirror casings, which heats up the interstage material—FOGBANK, we’re assuming—until 55 00:03:03,040 --> 00:03:07,430 it’s 85 million degrees Celsius hotter than the literal center of the sun, which triggers 56 00:03:07,430 --> 00:03:11,330 the nuclear fusion reaction in this bomb down here, and now everyone’s fusioning and fissioning 57 00:03:11,330 --> 00:03:15,129 back and forth like crazy until they just can’t take it anymore, and then, to put 58 00:03:15,129 --> 00:03:16,750 it lightly: boom. 59 00:03:16,750 --> 00:03:18,760 Okay, fun detour. 60 00:03:18,760 --> 00:03:22,890 So as you can imagine, remaking any part of this would not be super chill, and even though 61 00:03:22,890 --> 00:03:28,049 the NNSA invested 23 million dollars in developing a workable FOGBANK alternative, nobody could 62 00:03:28,049 --> 00:03:31,439 definitively conclude through simulation that such a thing would work, and it’s not like 63 00:03:31,439 --> 00:03:34,280 we’re just gonna do a bunch of nuclear testing for this new thing. 64 00:03:34,280 --> 00:03:38,810 So they really, really had to get FOGBANK—a material that probably needed to get as hot 65 00:03:38,810 --> 00:03:42,860 as the sun and took tons of dangerous, toxic, flammable chemicals to manufacture—right. 66 00:03:42,860 --> 00:03:49,370 Their first move was to reconstruct Facility 9404-11 to a T, a project that faced tons 67 00:03:49,370 --> 00:03:53,530 of construction delays and issues with—no surprise—imperfect documentation of how 68 00:03:53,530 --> 00:03:55,390 that facility was built the first time. 69 00:03:55,390 --> 00:04:01,000 Then in 2007, they produced new FOGBANK—FOGBANK that even had lower impurity levels than the 70 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:02,290 vintage stuff! 71 00:04:02,290 --> 00:04:04,030 And it… still didn’t work. 72 00:04:04,030 --> 00:04:09,250 So the NNSA upgraded the project to “Code Blue” status and threw 69 million more dollars 73 00:04:09,250 --> 00:04:10,250 at it. 74 00:04:10,250 --> 00:04:13,659 And the thing about just chucking loads of money at a seemingly unsolvable problem is… 75 00:04:13,659 --> 00:04:14,659 it worked. 76 00:04:14,659 --> 00:04:20,470 About a year later, in 2008, the NNSA recertified the production process for FOGBANK. 77 00:04:20,470 --> 00:04:25,600 As it happens, the issue with the flop FOGBANK from ‘07 was those lower impurity levels. 78 00:04:25,600 --> 00:04:30,320 By using a modern cleaning process in an early manufacturing stage, our dear scientists accidentally 79 00:04:30,320 --> 00:04:34,200 cleaned off a chemical that’s part of a key reaction down the line that makes FOGBANK 80 00:04:34,200 --> 00:04:35,200 work. 81 00:04:35,200 --> 00:04:36,350 Yep, that’s right. 82 00:04:36,350 --> 00:04:40,630 The US government spent 69 million dollars to reach a conclusion that nearly every mid-tier 83 00:04:40,630 --> 00:04:44,509 pop song already had: your imperfections are what make you beautiful, and never change 84 00:04:44,509 --> 00:04:45,509 for anyone. 85 00:04:45,509 --> 00:04:49,350 So they amended the new manufacturing process to add that chemical impurity back in down 86 00:04:49,350 --> 00:04:53,410 the line, and a short ten full years later, they delivered the last of the refurbished 87 00:04:53,410 --> 00:04:54,410 W-76es. 88 00:04:54,410 --> 00:04:56,420 Yay? 89 00:04:56,420 --> 00:05:00,050 The new process is illustrated in this very helpful and not-at-all-vague diagram from 90 00:05:00,050 --> 00:05:04,100 Los Alamos National Laboratory, which I pray isn’t the only written record of how we’re 91 00:05:04,100 --> 00:05:05,100 doing this. 92 00:05:05,100 --> 00:05:06,100 But maybe it is. 93 00:05:06,100 --> 00:05:08,850 If I’ve learned anything today, it’s that you can’t trust the people building weapons 94 00:05:08,850 --> 00:05:11,860 that will one day blow us all to smithereens to be just a little bit detail-oriented. 95 00:05:11,860 --> 00:05:16,470 But please, if any of those people are watching, learn from your mistakes! 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