> 1978: This report reviews aspects of the military applications of the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program at Sandia Laboratories
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6412035
> Today, research on inertial confinement fusion—the other leading approach—remains largely under the control of US national weapons labs. The military focus has had profound impacts on the development of inertial fusion energy.
https://thebulletin.org/2013/07/nuclear-weapons-the-death-of...
I understand that is not the marching orders of the US government but it could be, and it could also be a choice made by individuals on the ground.
I think you’d need some pretty well-qualified people to crunch the numbers before just, winging it with something different. Given the stakes and all.
You seem to have it backwards. The only reason we are alive is because the designed system that was built failed following a computer error. The point was to respond.
Societies and the world do not run on personal choices. Sometimes personal choices matter and can have reverberations throughout society, but assuming society can function on an accumulation of personal choices is a child's way of viewing the world. If you want to change something you find disagreeable, influence policy makers or somehow figure out how to change the academic landscape in America (which probably means you again need to influence policy makers). Otherwise, you'll keep finding more scientists making the "personal choice" to develop weapons for uncle sam.
You are of course correct that the best thing is to institutionally change things. But the institutional changes are usually pushed for due to actual public pressure.
No, it doesn't. But the time you convince someone (if you do), there are 5 more people that you now have to convince who weren't on the scene before.
You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things! And even among the assumed amount of 350 warheads, a lot of damage can be done. The US can do a lot of this as well! There is a nuclear triad on both sides.
Perhaps the No First Use policy is a lie. It is not a law of physics. But it is something. It is a posture that makes it harder for a nation to navigate in some liminal space that makes defensive and offensive posturing look exactly the same.
But the main point of course is that the current state of affairs is already amazingly powerful. What more do people want from their nukes? In what universe is 1500 deployed warheads (out of a stockpile of 5000) not enough to accomplish any sort of strategic objective? There have been many conflicts where 0 has been enough
China's "policies" last as long as their dictator cares to keep them. At the first sign of change that policy will disappear as well.
Also it's a clear lie as in a fictional world where China mainland was invaded and China was losing the war, it's rather absurd to think they would just sit on their nuclear weapons and not use them.
The US also wouldn't use them in a first strike, but drawdowns have to happen on both sides.
> You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things!
The US cannot. That's the entire point of international inspections. China would have to allow US inspections of their arsenal like is done to the US.
China's warheads are also generally higher yield - they're intended for counter-city ops, not counter-force.
The idea with the currently deployed warheads is that even after losses to a hostile first strike, they can still respond and cause unacceptable losses in the enemy. How many nukes does it take to cause 10% fatalities in the USSR? How many in China? And what percentage of those nukes are destroyed before launch, and how many make it though enemy defences to detonate where they should?
And of course, nukes decay.
I think that it is possible to maintain an existing set of weapons without trying to continue pushing the envelope towards even more destructive weapons, and that 5000 is a lot/enough.
If anything I'd image modern research is more interested in things like precision, collateral damage reduction, etc.
In WW2, even before dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US committed to a large bombing campaign that completely destroyed the country. The damage was so vast and total that the Japanese government did not even register Hiroshima to be unusual! Around that time other cities were also being razed to the ground, it just took more bombs to do so. During that war, in Europe and in Japan there were large bombing campaigns that indiscriminately killed many civilians. I find it hard to justify this (no, "they were doing the same" does not actually feel like a legitimate reason, especially when the narrative nowadays is that it was a battle between good and evil)
Low-yield tactical nukes seem to be playing with the idea of being able to have this option to massacre people more easily and play around with the idea of using nukes with no consequence. Higher-yield nukes seem to serve the purpose of more effectively wiping chunks of a city from a map. What magical weapon are we looking for that will make the world safer, and that accomplishes strategic objectives that are not already covered by both the existing nuclear arsenal and the conventional weapons of the US? Remember, normal bombs actually do things too!
Meanwhile, actual, legitimate No First Use policies would be much more effective at making the world a safer place. Stronger treaties to reduce nuclear arsenals, giving militaries less space to just push other countries around.
What would you have done instead to reduce their civilian casualties, under the constraints that the Allies still win the war and that Allied casualties don't increase?
Unconditional surrender in Japan lead to the US occupational government for 9 years (along with over 20 years occupation of Okinawa, which had to be pried out of the hands of the US military, who wanted to indefinitely keep it as a colony).
Now, I'm not going to cry over Nazis or the Japanese military not being able to get a conditional surrender. But Japan is especially stark: except for a handful of high profile executions, not only did most decision makers not face punishment, many of them ended up back in the government and as heads of state. All of this more or less at the behest of the US.
What is my point? The US chose to reach for an unconditional surrender, for some pretty realpolitik objectives, prolonging the suffering of the civilians on the ground. There is decent documentation that part of this is so that the US could determine surrender conditions rather than the USSR. There is an alternate universe of a negotiated surrender that shortened the Pacific front.
What does that universe look like? I do not know. It probably would not have lead to the US having military bases all over the country. But conditional surrenders are the norm in wars. Air campaigns allow for militaries to just decide "no, we will just continue to attack forever, as we suffer few casualties anyway".
Given that they let the emperor continue, they might as well have just allowed surrender with the promise the emperor would remain. But of course that choice was not made at that point.
An what I think people need to consider is that all of WW2 basically happened because the allies did not force unconditional surrender on Germany in WW1. A mistake that many wanted to avoid. Of course famously Wilson debated this question with Henry Cabot Lodge and that disagreement is a huge part in the US rejecting Versailles. Wilson justified himself by basically formulating the two Germans theory, ie there is the evil militaristic Prussian Germany and the good German people. Henry Cabot Lodge didn't buy that.
Sean McMeekin in his new book makes the point that FDR announced the unconditional surrender doctrine basically to placate Stalin and did it basically without fully coordinating that with the British. Attempting to offer the German military some sort of deal that would have made them remove the Nazis prevent Eastern Europe falling to Communism would have been a better policy. That is of course very controversial.
And if I have learned one thing, its that unconditional surrender is always a incredibly hot issue with people passionately arguing both sides.
You need to read more non-revisionist history books.
> In the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, 26 cities were attacked by the U.S. Army Air Force. Of these, eight — or almost a third — were as completely or more completely destroyed than Hiroshima (in terms of the percentage of the city destroyed). The fact that Japan had 68 cities destroyed in the summer of 1945 poses a serious challenge for people who want to make the bombing of Hiroshima the cause of Japan’s surrender. The question is: If they surrendered because a city was destroyed, why didn’t they surrender when those other 66 cities were destroyed?
> On August 2, you would have arrived at the office to reports that four more cities have been attacked. And the reports would have included the information that Toyama (roughly the size of Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1945), had been 99.5 percent destroyed. Virtually the entire city had been leveled. Four days later and four more cities have been attacked. On August 6, only one city, Hiroshima, was attacked but reports say that the damage was great and a new type bomb was used. How much would this one new attack have stood out against the background of city destruction that had been going on for weeks?
Of course the perspective of people who actually were on the ground is totally different. But if we are talking about strategic objectives, then how the leadership sees thing is in fact relevant!
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160221160530/https://foreignpo...
The purpose is probably personnel related: employees on this do not need a security clearance, so cost less.
Part of the purpose is definitely personnel related though. Part of the US nuclear deterrence is the projection of having a large, highly skilled nuclear weapon related workforce.
Wrt. inertial confinement fusion productization I think the delay is intentional (just look at Sandia z-machine results from 20+ years ago and all the ways of tempering and redirecting progress since then there) as such schemes allow for fusion weapons without fission primary which will completely break the non-proliferation regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
Do you have any reference for this?
I'm familiar with US Nuclear bunker buster bombs. But I've never seen any writing that makes the claim the US deterrence policy is targeting Putin.
Indeed [1] makes the claim that the US in incapable of successfully attacking Russian command and control bunkers and seems from a reasonably credible writer.
[1] https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/12/01/putins_...
Link to credible reports where the US said they would respond with nukes? AFAIK, this never happened and I paid close attention
Merely publishing a paper on a certain subtopic in the fusion space can easily be interpreted as an implied threat or threat response.
Of course the US does have a stated doctrine of using nukes only in response to nukes used against it or its allies. It is enormously doubtful that the US would trigger an end-of-days scenario in response to Russia using tactical/low-yield nukes against a non-US-ally like Ukraine, but the uncertainty is for sure purposefully cultivated.
I have read of spiking conventional fission warheads with a core of fusible material to boost yield, but maximizing yield does not seem to be the goal of these devices.
You're partially correct on accident. It _is_ single use, but not in the way you think. The NIF facility was built for the express purpose of nuclear weapon design, and any fusion science that comes out of it should be considered a happy accident. I can assure you that very nearly 100% of the people working at the NIF have Q level or higher clearance. The costs are absolutely astronomical.
I didn’t even know fusion had a weapons research program
The "hydrogen" in "hydrogen bomb" relates to fusion. In a nutshell, these types of devices use a fission bomb to create the environment (pressure/temperature) that causes lighter atoms to undergo fusion, which significantly boosts the explosive yield compared to a pure fission bomb.
I'd like us to focus on practical power generation. It will be the most defining aspect of future of US and largely the world. Everything is tied to energy and if we can make energy cheap enough so that its not worth metering; we'd secure the future from literally any calamity (including CC). Even the shittiest efficiency of carbon capture can be put to use when energy is cheap. 4% efficiency? Cool. Entropy increase from residual heat loss wouldn't make meaningful dent on the world's temperature. It is the carbon that is the problem (greenhouse effect).
We have an almost unlimited source of energy from nuclear + solar. There are always going to be people and ideologies that oppose technological progress and prevent humanity from propelling forward. I belong to the camp where I'd want us to become a Kardeshev Type 1 civilization. Fusion would be a direct contributing factor for it.
What is CC here? Cosmic collapse? Credit cards?
Edit: Ah, of course. Thanks.
China saw it that way, in the time of Han Chin, the first Chinese emperor. Wealth comes fundamentally from agriculture because then you can make more servants slash slaves for the emperor, that's literally what he called them, then instead of emperor you have an Emperor, Emperor of China. That's what the original historical sources say! More food more people more servitude more wealth for the man at the top of society.
So credit cards are that. Uniformly crazy interest rates, and shitty scams to jack up the rates just barely before getting taken to court. Or a French Revolution, which they know about and fear. Know the harm they do, the houses they take, the homeless they make, the people they imprison indirectly, the children they starve, they know. What's it's name, FICO score, patio11 talked about them, they are 100% certain you--anybody who reads this--is strictly inferior to them. He says if you talk back to their claim you are an inferior debtor who deserves a low credit score they react like it's a shoe factory dealing with a talking shoe. An object. A servant slash slave.
Owes them money just because. Or because that debt was inherited. They actually have all the machine learning models and all the statistics you could possibly ask for (generally they claim this is fraud detection, but it's price discrimination too) to determine exactly how much--to the thousandth of a percentage--they can fuck with people with their usury--their theft--before people go bananas. Usury means you gotta pay back the debt or be homeless. Tolerate crimes in your gainst with no recourse. Any crime. No recourse. In my case murder. No recourse. Cops won't show up for you.
Debt grows surprisingly fast. Just as surprisingly fast as the equity in the home grows surprisingly slow. People always feel cheated by their mortgage because they did get cheated by unforgivably incorrect math. What does that mean? Ignoring all the intermediate steps, more kids to inherit the debt.
And technically--and I can justify this mathematically and in a court of law--even simultaneously--compound interest is contradictory to the laws of physics. It would not work out mathematically even if they did do the math correctly, which they do not. It could work in an infinitely-dimensional universe. If they did it correctly. But not in a 3-dimensional universe. You can have, at absolute most, cubic growth. Otherwise you end up with shitty debt. Unforgivably incorrect math declaring you are a servant slash slave. A letter demanding you make a choice: servitude or tolerating crime against you.
Shitty debt.
Credit card debt.
9 billion humans.
Climate change.
Then what they should invest in is fission. Fuel for fission is much cheaper and CapEx is much less. And we have all the basic tech needed to make it happen. Its the missing will more then anything else.
More on recent fusion developments: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...
I am no scientist, so it is hard for me to know if team optimistic or team pessimistic is right. But even if it is the latter, I think we should put more money and research on it!
FYI she's largely been debunked as a fear monger. She swings the pendulum too far in the other direction when reality is somewhere in between.
Unless maybe if somebody figures out aneutronic fusion but we are nowhere close yet.
(He used to be one of those guys inside an ICBM silo during the Cold war)
Moller at least had a brief prototype that hovered.
There are probably real scientists, engineers, and approaches, but it's probably about fleecing dumb investors at a fundamental level.
> The record shot was a major scientific advance in fusion research, which establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible at NIF,” said Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for LLNL’s inertial confinement fusion program. “Achieving the conditions needed for ignition has been a long-standing goal for all inertial confinement fusion research and opens access to a new experimental regime where alpha-particle self-heating outstrips all the cooling mechanisms in the fusion plasma."