Some things are supposed to be unforgettable: like how to ride a bike, or how to manufacture
the interstage material in W-76 thermonuclear warheads.
But of course, with enough time, you can forget anything.
That’s why I fell off my bike this morning, and also why the US National Nuclear Security
Administration had to spend eight years and 92 million dollars trying to reverse-engineer
a material called FOGBANK… that they themselves had invented less than three decades prior.
So, what is FOGBANK, and how did it fall into—and get yanked out of—the national memory hole?
The short answer is a series of nuclear oopsie-doopsies.
The long answer begins in 1975.
Welcome to 1975!
Ford is president, Jaws has everyone all freaked out about sharks, and Burger King just started
selling the fish sandwich.
Yum!
Also, and this is a little more relevant, it’s still the Cold War, and the United
States is cookin’ up nukes, including that W-76.
And here, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the Y-12 complex, in Facility 9404-11, they made
bank.
Well, they made FOGBANK, a very important but very secret part of those payloads.
How secret?
Just ask their general manager.
They finished the last of the W-76es in 1989.
Four years after that, the facility was slated for decommissioning, and everyone who knew
how to make FOGBANK moved on with their lives.
Some left the agency, some retired, but what absolutely none of them did was write down
or teach anyone else how to make this stuff, meaning that by the year 2000, FOGBANK was
the nuclear equivalent of your grandma’s special brownie recipe that no one in the
family can replicate.
Though, for what it’s worth, her secret was baking it on the top rack of the oven
for half the time, then rotating the pan 180 degrees and moving it to the bottom rack for
the rest.
Hey, maybe that’s how you make FOGBANK!
Try it out and let me know.
So it turns out that nukes, much like knowledge of how to make them, deteriorate over time.
And in 2000, the NNSA created a plan to refurbish all those W-76es they’d built in the seventies
and eighties so they’d last until at least 2040.
A perfect plan, except that it required more FOGBANK and, well, you know where this is
going: nobody knew how to make it.
Everyone who did had either died or just forgot, and there were barely any records to go on.
And to understand how tough—and how dangerous—it was to re-manufacture FOGBANK from scratch,
we’re going to take a quick detour into what FOGBANK is… probably.
For all the secrecy around FOGBANK, there’s a fair bit of consensus around what it most
likely is and does.
It’s assumed to be an aerogel, which is an extremely light—yet extremely strong—type
of material nicknamed “frozen smoke” or “San Francisco fog.”
There are a few reasons everyone suspects FOGBANK is an aerogel: its cool nickname for
one, and for two, the fact that former-NNSA director Tom D’Agostino has mentioned that
the compound acetonitrile—commonly used to produce aerogels—was part of the FOGBANK
production process.
As far as what it does, it’s understood to be an interstage between the fission and
fusion parts of the bomb.
Because, in simplest terms, a thermonuclear bomb works like this: there’s a conventional
bomb here that blows up, which puts enough pressure on this fission bomb to start splitting
atoms, so that blows up and sends out a bunch of gamma and X-rays that bounce off these
beryllium mirror casings, which heats up the interstage material—FOGBANK, we’re assuming—until
it’s 85 million degrees Celsius hotter than the literal center of the sun, which triggers
the nuclear fusion reaction in this bomb down here, and now everyone’s fusioning and fissioning
back and forth like crazy until they just can’t take it anymore, and then, to put
it lightly: boom.
Okay, fun detour.
So as you can imagine, remaking any part of this would not be super chill, and even though
the NNSA invested 23 million dollars in developing a workable FOGBANK alternative, nobody could
definitively conclude through simulation that such a thing would work, and it’s not like
we’re just gonna do a bunch of nuclear testing for this new thing.
So they really, really had to get FOGBANK—a material that probably needed to get as hot
as the sun and took tons of dangerous, toxic, flammable chemicals to manufacture—right.
Their first move was to reconstruct Facility 9404-11 to a T, a project that faced tons
of construction delays and issues with—no surprise—imperfect documentation of how
that facility was built the first time.
Then in 2007, they produced new FOGBANK—FOGBANK that even had lower impurity levels than the
vintage stuff!
And it… still didn’t work.
So the NNSA upgraded the project to “Code Blue” status and threw 69 million more dollars
at it.
And the thing about just chucking loads of money at a seemingly unsolvable problem is…
it worked.
About a year later, in 2008, the NNSA recertified the production process for FOGBANK.
As it happens, the issue with the flop FOGBANK from ‘07 was those lower impurity levels.
By using a modern cleaning process in an early manufacturing stage, our dear scientists accidentally
cleaned off a chemical that’s part of a key reaction down the line that makes FOGBANK
work.
Yep, that’s right.
The US government spent 69 million dollars to reach a conclusion that nearly every mid-tier
pop song already had: your imperfections are what make you beautiful, and never change
for anyone.
So they amended the new manufacturing process to add that chemical impurity back in down
the line, and a short ten full years later, they delivered the last of the refurbished
W-76es.
Yay?
The new process is illustrated in this very helpful and not-at-all-vague diagram from
Los Alamos National Laboratory, which I pray isn’t the only written record of how we’re
doing this.
But maybe it is.
If I’ve learned anything today, it’s that you can’t trust the people building weapons
that will one day blow us all to smithereens to be just a little bit detail-oriented.
But please, if any of those people are watching, learn from your mistakes!
Write stuff down!
I do not want my government to waste 92 mil of potential train money on this mess ever
again.
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