Mini Nukes and M16: The Economy of War
The discussion below is a rare glimpse into the world of modern warfare and weapons design. The participants are the author and one or more members of America’s advanced weapon research facilities. We begin our discussion examining potential elements used to replace plutonium in both reactors and weapons as well.
Below is the unclassified part of a discussion covering subjects that may well define not only warfare but human survival as well as seen from inside the advanced weapons research community.
Q: Shouldn’t we be replacing Plutonium in our weapons and fuel programs now that America’s production capability is declining?
A: We have so much PU already in storage. Why break something that is not broke? This is the same argument that the Thorium people are claiming. Yes Thorium will work in a reactor but why. Its efficiency is too low. You still need uranium to get it started, just less. Neptunium will work but why? It takes at least twice as much and production rates would be one tenth as much. Why build a new breeder reactor just to make more radioactive fuel and waste when we have over 100 tons of PU already made and in storage.
The other issue is testing. NO new weapons can be made or tested. End of story, PU works and it is cheaper. This is just another physics test.
Q: America is losing its capability of maintaining the “big bomb” inventory that is the basis of the START agreements from back in 1991.
A: Nuclear criticality designs up until now have all been based on these big bomb concepts. Today it’s the micro nuke. How small can you make it? 911 was the demo for what small nukes can do. The clock cannot be reset. This was called a fizzle back in the 1950′s and 60′s but a fizzle still goes bang. It is just a much smaller bang. So they ignored it. Today the war fighting doctrine has changed.
Read more here:
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link to journal-neo.org]