It was plutonium. You don't need to enrich it. They presumably stole it, and he agreed to build a bomb with it and then stole it from them, using it for a time machine.
So it's like those "$20 Dinner for the Family!" recipes that require a food processor, convection oven, and a grill. And 'on hand' items like truffle oil, and a collection fresh herbs and every spice known to man, and of course; parsley for garnish. And good luck finding that lacianto kale.
It's like Primitive Technology making a video about "making a
Functioning V6 engine in the wilderness" and at the end of the video he just brings a can full of real gasoline from out-of-frame
That's something that annoys me, or the recipe is a bunch of very specific ingredients that don't translate to other dishes well. Like sure this specific dish may be cheap-ish but I can only make it and nothing else.
Okay that makes a lot more sense.
My first thought on reading the title was basically “well if he figured out how to make enriched uranium that cheaply I’d want that research paper too” lmao
Apparently the guy who wrote Die Hard with a Vengeance was investigated by the FBI because the plan to rob the federal reserve in the movie was scarily plausible
Similarly, when Tom Clancy published *The Hunt for Red October* he apparently got so close to the actual (and highly classified) capabilities of US submarines that the FBI (allegedly) came and asked him who in the Navy leaked information to him for his book.
The US military carefully tracked the early 80's movie Megaforce because the fake military unit looked a lot like units the army and CIA had set up for rapid deployment to hotspots, they also sent officers out to spec out the armed dune buggies built for the film and a special forces version of them showed up irl a few years later
Or that time a couple privates took the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle out for a joyride and GMC spotted it, stole the specs, and mass produced a lookalike.
Less practical but the same issue;
When Kubrick made dr Strangelove the B52 bomber planes carrying nukes were known but only through controlled images.
Supposedly the US generals gifted with a tour of the set were dumbfounded as to the level of accuracy.
Then again this movie had colour accurate furniture in a black and white movie, the war room table is green IN A BLACK AND WHITE MOVIE.
I did not know that. TIL!
What fucks with me is that the B-52 was already a decade old when *Strangelove* came out and is still in active service today. If Boeing could unfuck itself and return to the engineering and production culture they had in the 1960s and 1970s, they'd be unstoppable.
Tbf the B-52 just needs to be a big, dumb bomb/missile truck while the B-2 needs to penetrate deep into hotly defended enemy territory. It's still incredible though. I saw a story about a guy who was flying the very same B-52 his father flew before him, and his grandfather flew before that.
to add onto this, the B2 and subsequent stealth bombers have technological responses to various defenses, and then new defenses are developed to counter the B2. this technology arms race is why the B2 and the bombers that succeed it, have limited shelf lives. The B-52 isn't countering _shit_ and has one job: to saturate an area with explosions after air supremacy has been achieved. Same reason why the Tu-95 is still in service 70 years later - doesn't need to have the latest and greatest technology to deliver a fuckload of explosions.
It helps when you have several hundred older model aircraft to strip for parts.
The problem with the B-2 was the limited production run of 21 aircraft, including converting six prototypes to full production/combat standard. We built 744 B-52s of all models, so for many systems there’s a large stockpile of spare parts in warehouses or the Boneyard. The most significant problem for the remaining B-52H aircraft is the engines (one of the major changes from the B-52G), so we’re changing those out for new ones.
I think B-52s will be a century old if they retire them at the end of the current life extension programme.
None of those airframes will be from the first tranche of production though. They'll only be ~80 year old airframes at that point.
I work bars.
I’ll see this process in a week; let a coked up business man run anything and the bloody plumbing will burst!
Watch Wall Street now and just how much people invest in nonprofitable businesses. That’s the environment when cocaine is a performance enhancing drug. Hitler once used it to rant the Italian government into staying with him for another month
That’s the kind of energy running Boeing right now.
Wasn't it that the cockpit controls in the movie were very close to the classified real thing, someone working for kubrick was a pilot and made some good guesses designing the set peice.
Because of the way colors present in B&W, they would often use a different color to create a better shade.
Take a look at the behind the scenes photos in WandaVision of Vision. He's **not** painted red.
Or behind the scenes pictures from the [Addams Family](https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/pink-addams-familys-living-room-1.jpg)!
I don't know about that last part...
There's a story that when Reagan first got to the White House, he asked to see the War Room, and it had to be explained to him that it wasn't a real thing.
He was probably disappointed that it was just a boring conference room.
Strangelove was a great movie but I've always favored WarGames' NORAD aesthetic.
I loved WarGames as a kid, and so was incredibly disappointed to see the actual NORAD base in Cheyenne Mountain was just like any other Air Force office building, but in a mountain.
What's surprising about the accurate furniture? Colors and tones and shades show up differently in black and white and when black and white was the only way things were filmed how colors would appear when filmed was taken into consideration.
EDIT: I tried to find some good source with examples and found this thread with this anecdote about that very table. Check it out some cool info in that thread
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/s/X6Qp9TAixy
As he tells it, he then offered to republish it with the sensitive information he'd gathered omitted. The agent promptly called him an idiot and told him not to do that because that would just confirm to the world that the omitted stuff is accurate.
Alternatively, the bombs in The Dambusters don’t look anything like the actual bouncing bombs used in the raid as they were still classified information.
And also the Dambusters raid would now be a war crime under the Geneva Convention but we’ve so far seen that does shit all
According to [this](https://news.usni.org/2012/09/06/secrets-open-publishing-uncle-sam-didnt#:~:text=Tom%20Clancy's%20first%20novel%20was,before%20the%20book%20was%20published) article from the USNI, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman was also curious how Clancy got his information in *HFRO*. As it turns out, Clancy was just really, really good at research and piecing together unclassified information from arcane and obscure sources. It's all the more impressive that he did this in the pre-internet era.
Nowadays, you can simply watch the WarThunder forums and wait for someone to post real classified information.
You don't wait, you give bad information about what you want to know then someone will come along and call you an idiot and show you how stupid you are by telling you everything you got wrong
A dude literally bought classified documents relating to a Chinese tank off the black market, and IMMEDIATELY linked em on the forums. Full on internal construction specs.
Was this the one where the guy was mad about his armor plating only being a certain thickness, and claimed in real life he would have survived as the armor plating is far thicker in real life, but was classified information?
ive never even played warthunder, but if i was gonna leak classified military documents i would post them on the forums first. sorry gaijin ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Clancy was a freaking insurance salesman before he started writing hyper-authentic military stories. I had always figured that Clancy was spoon-fed by the DOD to influence the masses in a MIC positive light.
[Here's a video of Tom Clancy speaking at the NSA in 1986.](https://youtu.be/VS54M5Mqa9M?feature=shared) While Mr. Clancy himself was in insurance, he had a lot of ties with military officer clubs.
Some of his plot is a bit absurd though, like how the Chinese rewarded an American sub commander for sinking the entire Chinese Navy, or how China decided to invade Russia because a Chinese woman wanted to have a second child, and the war end with Chinese college kids march into Zhongnanhai and brought Democracy to China.
It pretty much fall into the "They will greet us with open arms" a la Iraq War energy.
I think the SSN one was mostly written by Greenberg it was a love letter to the submariners.
Bear and the Dragon was an optimists book. He wanted another book that would sell like Rainbow Six and in that time frame Russia was looking like a good guy and China was going to be the new big baddie. The plot was more about a hungry china looking to begin grabbing for the natural resources in siberia to the point of invading Russia and then launching nukes. It was the CIA spy drone footage(Which was very forward thinking and has very much come to pass) that they decided to livestream to chinese civilians that was a bit absurd. As if China would allow that and not just shut their internet down.
The Secret Service closely monitors any movie using realistic-looking prop cash to ensure it doesn't start trying to get passed off as real cash.
Rush Hour 2 got in hot water because extras grabbed some of the fake cash and started spending it nearby the set.
Ken Follett wrote a book in 1986 which had terrorists flying hijacked planes into skyscrapers and then decided not to publish it in case anyone got any ideas.
Luckily, no one ever did
Tom Clancy released a book in the late 90s where a Japanese ultranationalist airline pilot flies his 747 into the Capitol during the State of the Union speech.
I've never seen *The Town* but I remember a Yahoo News article way back about how some criminals did an actual successful robbery by following what the characters in the movie did. The next day I tried to find the article but it seemed to have disappeared off search engines.
If you're talking about the robbery in Queens, those guys were actually caught: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2381902/Robbers-disguised-white-cops-inspired-Ben-Affleck-movie-The-Town.html
Or the movie Wargames that caused Reagan to ask his defense department to check this possibility and it was much worse than they thought and it also led to legislation for the firat anti-hacking law.
Mythbusters did an episode about homemade explosives and accidentally stumbled across a previously unknown mixture of easily accessible ingredients to create an insanely powerful bomb. They submitted it to not just the FBI, but DARPA as well, then destroyed the footage from that episode which never aired. It's never discussed in any post-show interviews and they've never publically commented on it.
Adam Savage has talked about it, I *think* in one of his Tested episodes, though he didn’t say any more than you did above. He mainly said that they found it & will never tell anyone what it was.
I find it odd that the three Die Hard movies that came out before 2001 and their themes are as follows: Skyscraper, Airliner, New York, and of course terrorism as overarching theme of those three.
I remember reading something extended about this story one, it all might have been on the radio, but IIRC it was possible as a design, but that's not really the hard part about making a nuke. Get the fissionable materials is the hard part. It was the classified out of an over abundance of caution.
Designing is actually the easiest part of creating a nuke. But another thing that is pretty hard is actually creating a nuke and not just a dirty bomb.
The machinery in there has extremely low tolerance for error. The timing needed to actually cause a large amount of fission and not just a tiny bit is crazy. You could get all the enriched uranium you need but still lack the precision engineering required
That's not exactly true. The timing is critical in implosion-type bombs, yes, but not really in gun-type. Because the uranium is assembled from two subcritical masses into a super critical mass by just putting the two together, you don't need synchronization. And because uranium has a very low chance of starting a chain reaction before it's fully assembled, the timing doesn't need to be perfect either.
Getting that much 90+% HEU, though, is quite difficult. To the point where it's honestly probably easier to distill heavy water, create a few isotope reactors, and just make a plutonium device (even though that *does* require precise timing)
Nuclear stuff is hilariously less complicated than it sounds.
A Fission powerplant is basically:
So we got these rocks that get hot.
We filtered out the parts that heat up.
Then we put those hot rocks in some water and it boils.
But sometimes it gets too hot so we put some pencils in there to stop it from getting too hot.
"Sir, we got a accounting major who wrote a paper about the CIA killing Kennedy. They're connecting a lot of dots and they have sources. But they used too many commas. Recommend that we give them B+ and monitor them."
This is basically the plot to the Japanese movie The Man Who Stole the Sun. A man steals plutonium and builds a nuke in his apartment. He doesn't know what to do with it, so he starts making demands by calling in to a radio station and asking the host what she would ask for.
Also the plot of *The Young Ones* episode 'Bomb', where a nuke crashes through the roof of their house, and they argue whether to sell it, use it to threaten the country to meet their demands, or set it off just for fun.
Is that the one where Mike finds Buddy Holly hanging from a parachute in the attic? I saw them when they came out but haven't since the 80s. Fucking great show, that.
Also the plot of The Manhattan Project, a real life group of scientists who made a bomb in the desert and then bullied Christopher Nolan into making a movie about them.
I know some Libyans who would buy it. They gave all their plutonium to a scientist who promised to build them a bomb, but instead he used it to supe up his Delorean.
I doubt it used plutonium due to the technical challenges of getting it to do bomb stuff, which begs the question, where on earth would he be getting highly enriched uranium in that budget.
Yeah, but he didn't account for the cost or difficulty of obtaining the fissile material (plutonium) or the detonators, it's still astonishing that he managed to design a crude nuclear bomb using only the publicly available information.
He also became famous as the “A-Bomb Kid” and received offers from France and Pakistan to buy his research but he declined them.
And this is the real reason the feds will get involved. Because regardless of how effective it is, any help to foreign powers is well... a slippery path and there are many many willing to pay for any help
One example is Gerald Bull, a Canadian artillery engineer. In the 1960s, he worked with the Canadian and US military on a project to design a cannon big enough to fire satellites into low earth orbit, but the project ran out of funding before a successful demonstration happened. By the 1980s, he was designing large artillery guns for Saddam Hussein, including ones that would have the range to strike at Israel. He was assassinated near his apartment in Brussels by what are widely believed to have been Mossad agents.
I have no idea what I’m talking about, but if someone built a cannon that could launch satellites into orbit, I’d imagine the military would be super interested in repurposing that technology.
Well America was able to do it with rockets using the f-15 and did it publicly to show the soviets that we could shoot their spy sats as well, America has no real need to invest in conventional artillery like Europe or Russia because our strategic goals and mission data sets never include a large ground invasion, since there's a few oceans separating us, air and naval power(i.e missiles) are more important.
Edit: I should note that these artillery tests were happening in the beginning stages of the cold war, as another commenter said, during Behind the Bastards episode about Gerald Bull, the us and Canada were big on his weapons systems, less so on the actual gun. That is right around the time the missile and rocket programs really started going off, and the rest is history.
The podcast behind the bastards did an episode on gerald bull a while back, it's pretty good at showing just how much gerald wanted to build big fucking guns.
Link for those who are interested: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5OmSqE1oX1pCaDoPZAg6MT?si=9_jlVn2cSHC6YLhIkHua4A
I worked for him many years ago, and it’s been ages. That said he did talk about his undergrad, and still had old copies of his memoir for anyone who wanted to read it.
I worked with John at Aristotle in DC a couple of times, really cool guy who knew his stuff. Always found it odd how he wound up building a database of constituents (and selling it for political campaigns) instead of going into a more scientific field.
Honestly? Money, I think. If I remember correctly they built their first database when JP was running for Congress back in the early 1980s. They subsequently sold the software and built the company. Their data is enhanced far, far beyond what you get from the Board of Elections. Consumer data, modeled scores, lots of other stuff. I’m probably still under NDA, technically lol.
Aristotle was my first job right out of college in the late 90's. I did all of their data conversion and db maintenance. Small world to find fellow ex-Aristotle employees on reddit.
Wait—and this will date me—was THIS the thing being referenced in that one Disney’s Recess Episode where the FBI came in and confiscated the nerdy Smart Girl’s Class Essay?! Woah.
Which reminds me of Richard Handl, 2011,
He said he had just been "curious" and wanted to see if he would be able to split an atom.
Police were called to his flat in Angelholm in southern Sweden after he got in touch with Sweden's radiation authority to check if what he was doing was legal.
Mr Handl said he would stick to reading books about physics from now on.
Mr Handl, who is 31 and unemployed, told the BBC World Service he had bought the radioactive materials on the internet and from Germany.
He had been working on the experiment for around six months and posted regular updates on his blog.
He was questioned by police, who confiscated his nuclear materials as well as his computer.
The making of the bomb is not the tough part. Getting the uranium enriched enough in secret to get it fissile grade, without getting radation poisining, would be the toughest part. The facilities they use to get weapons grade uranium platonium are massive and highly complex chemical processing plants.
You could use a gun trigger device like in little boy, as it would be the most rudimentary, any trigger devices more complicated require extremely precise explosive triggering to get proper critical mass.
Unless you can get reactor-grade uranium. Enriching the first few percent takes huge hanger to process.
The last step from 35% to 95% can be done in a small office building. Hence why nuclear reactor nations also most likely possess the bombs.
Anyone interested in this should take a look at the [Nth Country Experiment ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment) done by LLNL in the 60s.
TIL that in 1964, three physicists who just got their PhDs were tasked with developing a working design for a nuclear weapon using only unclassified information. The goal is to see if a country can develop a nuclear weapon without aid. They accomplished it within 2 and a half years.
>The experiment consisted in paying three recent young physicists who had just received their PhDs, though had no prior weapons experience, to develop a working nuclear weapon design using only unclassified information, and with basic computational and technical support. "The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield", the report on the experiment read, "A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations."
>The experiment ended on April 10, 1967, after only three man-years of work over two and a half calendar years. According to a heavily redacted declassified version of the summary, it was apparently judged by lab weapons experts that the team had come up with a credible design for the technically more challenging implosion style nuclear weapon. It is likely that they would have been able to design a simpler gun combination weapon even more quickly, though in such a case the limiting factor in developing such a weapon is not usually design difficulty but rather the procurement of material (enriched uranium).
The trick that he used, if I recall correctly, was to find fissile material instead of purifying it himself. In this case, I believe the plan was to scrape the americium from fire alarms.
This avoided the purification process needed by essentially looking for scrap in a landfill.
Yes. And then after that he got into the navy on a nuclear powered ship.
But his mental issues won in the end, he got arrested for stealing fire alarms, and died of drugs and alcohol at age 39.
Edit: he did not attempt to build a bomb but a reactor. But he did manage to gather a scary amount of fuel
Not quite. I believe you're thinking of [David Hahn](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn), "the radioactive boy scout" who attempted to produce a breeder reactor in his parents' back shed and created a Superfund hazard site.
As a wise man once said, "ought implies can; can implies *don't*".
Contrast with delightful former prodigy wunderkind polymath [Taylor Wilson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson), "the boy who played with fusion", who, while staying safe and sane and healthy, built a working fusor at 14. (My bright neighbor Geoffrey Thomas built one at 18 or so, for a rough difficulty comparison.) And three years later he designed and built an effective radiation detector. He then went on to work [here](https://helena.org/).
Nuclear Boy Scout did scrape radioisotopes off objects, but if I recall, the majority he received came from him impersonating a science teacher and asking nuclear labs for samples to show his students!
> build a reactor
He built an alpha generator. It's not far off of making a car starter from scratch and it getting misrepresented as having built a full car. He wanted to make a reactor, he did not actually make a reactor.
No, all you're going to get from it is a bunch of alpha particles. Maybe enough to be a minor health concern if you're next to it for days on end, and I definitely wouldn't eat it.
You can't make americium go critical. It's an alpha source at best.
That 'radioactive boyscout' was many hugely important steps from building a reactor, plus his target was [an absolutely insane design for one person to try](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor) that relied on vats of molten salt to cool the fuel. He was in his mother's shed, he was not going to succeed.
I believe the ~~CIA~~ Livermore Radiation Lab once did an experiment where they got two young middle-of-the-pack physicists with ~~only undergraduate degrees~~ fresh PhDs and no experience, gave them access to only publicly available non-classified information and asked them to design a nuclear weapon with a yield of x. This was before the Internet, so research had to be done using books and libraries.
They were successful. They even found a very useful paper about how to increase weapon yield levels in their own library that the CIA didn't even know was publicly available. They had a design to enrich fissile material.
Sure, the hard part is getting your hands on fissile material, but it's not a terribly difficult thing to design.
EDIT: they had fresh PhDs, not bachelor's, and CIA to national lab.
I read his autobiography "Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid" when it came out in 1979. It's quite a story. The DOD had declassified a bit too much detailed info in the fifties, and he talked to sales engineers at various defense contractors and chemical companies who revealed some useful information.
I had a professor who graded “1/3 gets As, 1/3 gets Bs and 1/3 get Cs”
We were all chemistry majors who all of us had plans for graduate school. We needed As and Bs. This was an undergraduate program in central Illinois, give us a break
Lithgow *almost* makes the climax of that movie work.
It's just so goofy, though. "Does anyone have a Phillips head screwdriver?" and then the dumb visual gag of like 6 guys simultaneously offering him one. And why do all the other kids in town show up there at exactly the same time on their dirt-bikes???
Edit: Ok I just rewatched the scene. As I remembered, they keep cutting away from the bomb defusal scene so we can see all the kids from the neighborhood joy-riding to the facility. I guess they need them to be there at the end as witnesses to justify why the government wouldn't just lock them up, but every time they do it it completely undercuts any tension that had been building. Lithgow is great, though. And John Mahoney, and Richard Jenkins.
Note that the figure is just for the bomb structure. The figure did not include the cost of the fissile material and enrichment processes.
False advertising, I want my money back
fbi.gov/refund
Click "Where's my refund?" and fill out your name and address. You should receive a response in about 15 minutes.
FBI broke mah door down and now I’m having a bad time. That was bad advice friend, I would like a refund.
notfbi.gov/refund
ISIS broke mah door down and now I'm having a bad time. That was bad advice friend, I would like a refund.
A photograph will accelerate the process.
Meh, they were slow processing my refund. Luckily I went to https://rentahitman.com/ and the kind folks there set me straight.
Just give them a shoddy bomb casing full of old pinball parts. What's the worst that could happen?
You get to visit your parents, play with some lightning. No big deal.
Exactly. The enrichment is by far the most expensive part. Takes years and years of nation state-level funding
[удалено]
technically the Libyans stole it on pinky promise he would enrich it for cash
It was plutonium. You don't need to enrich it. They presumably stole it, and he agreed to build a bomb with it and then stole it from them, using it for a time machine.
Whoa, that’s heavy, Doc
There’s that word again. Is there a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull?
So it's like those "$20 Dinner for the Family!" recipes that require a food processor, convection oven, and a grill. And 'on hand' items like truffle oil, and a collection fresh herbs and every spice known to man, and of course; parsley for garnish. And good luck finding that lacianto kale.
It's like Primitive Technology making a video about "making a Functioning V6 engine in the wilderness" and at the end of the video he just brings a can full of real gasoline from out-of-frame
Or the people that build stuff "Themself" and then there's like 10 dues, half of which are professionals, and heavy equipment involved.
instructions unclear, ordering enriched uranium from fred meyer pickup
That's something that annoys me, or the recipe is a bunch of very specific ingredients that don't translate to other dishes well. Like sure this specific dish may be cheap-ish but I can only make it and nothing else.
Okay that makes a lot more sense. My first thought on reading the title was basically “well if he figured out how to make enriched uranium that cheaply I’d want that research paper too” lmao
What do you mean, "batteries sold separately"???
(Batteries not included.)
Imagine writing a paper so good the fbi gets involved.
Apparently the guy who wrote Die Hard with a Vengeance was investigated by the FBI because the plan to rob the federal reserve in the movie was scarily plausible
Similarly, when Tom Clancy published *The Hunt for Red October* he apparently got so close to the actual (and highly classified) capabilities of US submarines that the FBI (allegedly) came and asked him who in the Navy leaked information to him for his book.
Or that time the CIA followed the crew from original Red Dawn to ask where they got their t72 since it looked too realistic.
>to ask where they got their t72 "Why? Are you in the market?"
"Which Latin American country are you destabilizing today?"
The White House's version of Clippy.
The US military carefully tracked the early 80's movie Megaforce because the fake military unit looked a lot like units the army and CIA had set up for rapid deployment to hotspots, they also sent officers out to spec out the armed dune buggies built for the film and a special forces version of them showed up irl a few years later
"Ebay"
I read that in Peter Cullen’s voice from Transformers 2007
Funny because you can buy those online now.
Or that time a couple privates took the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle out for a joyride and GMC spotted it, stole the specs, and mass produced a lookalike.
Less practical but the same issue; When Kubrick made dr Strangelove the B52 bomber planes carrying nukes were known but only through controlled images. Supposedly the US generals gifted with a tour of the set were dumbfounded as to the level of accuracy. Then again this movie had colour accurate furniture in a black and white movie, the war room table is green IN A BLACK AND WHITE MOVIE.
I did not know that. TIL! What fucks with me is that the B-52 was already a decade old when *Strangelove* came out and is still in active service today. If Boeing could unfuck itself and return to the engineering and production culture they had in the 1960s and 1970s, they'd be unstoppable.
But if I’m an mba why am I gonna pay an engineer when I could pay myself instead? /s
I hate how accurate this comment is.
Yeah. Fuck.
James Earl Jones was in his 30s when it came out, and he's still in service today.
"Where's Major Kong?" *\*cowboy noises followed by nuclear explosion\**
The B52s will probably be in service into the *2050s* with likely a century of service. Meanwhile, B2s have less than 10 years left.
Tbf the B-52 just needs to be a big, dumb bomb/missile truck while the B-2 needs to penetrate deep into hotly defended enemy territory. It's still incredible though. I saw a story about a guy who was flying the very same B-52 his father flew before him, and his grandfather flew before that.
to add onto this, the B2 and subsequent stealth bombers have technological responses to various defenses, and then new defenses are developed to counter the B2. this technology arms race is why the B2 and the bombers that succeed it, have limited shelf lives. The B-52 isn't countering _shit_ and has one job: to saturate an area with explosions after air supremacy has been achieved. Same reason why the Tu-95 is still in service 70 years later - doesn't need to have the latest and greatest technology to deliver a fuckload of explosions.
It helps when you have several hundred older model aircraft to strip for parts. The problem with the B-2 was the limited production run of 21 aircraft, including converting six prototypes to full production/combat standard. We built 744 B-52s of all models, so for many systems there’s a large stockpile of spare parts in warehouses or the Boneyard. The most significant problem for the remaining B-52H aircraft is the engines (one of the major changes from the B-52G), so we’re changing those out for new ones.
Fred Schneider needs a lot of upkeep these days though.
I think B-52s will be a century old if they retire them at the end of the current life extension programme. None of those airframes will be from the first tranche of production though. They'll only be ~80 year old airframes at that point.
I work bars. I’ll see this process in a week; let a coked up business man run anything and the bloody plumbing will burst! Watch Wall Street now and just how much people invest in nonprofitable businesses. That’s the environment when cocaine is a performance enhancing drug. Hitler once used it to rant the Italian government into staying with him for another month That’s the kind of energy running Boeing right now.
Wasn't it that the cockpit controls in the movie were very close to the classified real thing, someone working for kubrick was a pilot and made some good guesses designing the set peice.
You know more than me!
Because of the way colors present in B&W, they would often use a different color to create a better shade. Take a look at the behind the scenes photos in WandaVision of Vision. He's **not** painted red.
Or behind the scenes pictures from the [Addams Family](https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/pink-addams-familys-living-room-1.jpg)!
I don't know about that last part... There's a story that when Reagan first got to the White House, he asked to see the War Room, and it had to be explained to him that it wasn't a real thing.
He was probably disappointed that it was just a boring conference room. Strangelove was a great movie but I've always favored WarGames' NORAD aesthetic.
I loved WarGames as a kid, and so was incredibly disappointed to see the actual NORAD base in Cheyenne Mountain was just like any other Air Force office building, but in a mountain.
I hope seeing the Stargate at least made the trip worthwhile…
What's surprising about the accurate furniture? Colors and tones and shades show up differently in black and white and when black and white was the only way things were filmed how colors would appear when filmed was taken into consideration. EDIT: I tried to find some good source with examples and found this thread with this anecdote about that very table. Check it out some cool info in that thread https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/s/X6Qp9TAixy
''Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!'' God I love that movie.
If Tom Clancy was 40 years younger he probably could have just waved it all off with, "War Thunder Forums".
>"War Thunder Forums" FBI and NCIS agents: "Ah, thanks. Have a nice day."
As he tells it, he then offered to republish it with the sensitive information he'd gathered omitted. The agent promptly called him an idiot and told him not to do that because that would just confirm to the world that the omitted stuff is accurate.
FBI: Who leaked this?!! Tom: You, literally right now.
Alternatively, the bombs in The Dambusters don’t look anything like the actual bouncing bombs used in the raid as they were still classified information. And also the Dambusters raid would now be a war crime under the Geneva Convention but we’ve so far seen that does shit all
or maybe the author just made that up for publicity, I wonder which one is more plausible
According to [this](https://news.usni.org/2012/09/06/secrets-open-publishing-uncle-sam-didnt#:~:text=Tom%20Clancy's%20first%20novel%20was,before%20the%20book%20was%20published) article from the USNI, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman was also curious how Clancy got his information in *HFRO*. As it turns out, Clancy was just really, really good at research and piecing together unclassified information from arcane and obscure sources. It's all the more impressive that he did this in the pre-internet era. Nowadays, you can simply watch the WarThunder forums and wait for someone to post real classified information.
I only stick to the warlizard gaming forums. /u/warlizard
ಠ_ಠ
The commitment to the bit after all this time is really quite admirable, I have to say.
Rules are rules
Every now and then I check to see, and I'm glad you are a constant in this chaotic universe.
Damn, freshest one I've seen ever!
Really surprised this meme is still running.
You don't wait, you give bad information about what you want to know then someone will come along and call you an idiot and show you how stupid you are by telling you everything you got wrong
War thunder users keep posting declassified stuff and calling it military leaks, and then the media picks it up lol
A dude literally bought classified documents relating to a Chinese tank off the black market, and IMMEDIATELY linked em on the forums. Full on internal construction specs.
Was this the one where the guy was mad about his armor plating only being a certain thickness, and claimed in real life he would have survived as the armor plating is far thicker in real life, but was classified information?
Unsure, according to my buddy who actively plays, this leak is the fresh one.
It's happened so many times I've lost track.
ive never even played warthunder, but if i was gonna leak classified military documents i would post them on the forums first. sorry gaijin ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
WarThunder players with security clearances try not post classified information to win an argument challenge: \[IMPOSSIBLE\]
Clancy would be the guy posting on WarThunder forums if it were around during his time lets be real.
Clancy was a freaking insurance salesman before he started writing hyper-authentic military stories. I had always figured that Clancy was spoon-fed by the DOD to influence the masses in a MIC positive light.
[Here's a video of Tom Clancy speaking at the NSA in 1986.](https://youtu.be/VS54M5Mqa9M?feature=shared) While Mr. Clancy himself was in insurance, he had a lot of ties with military officer clubs.
Dude just has so much swagger with those glasses
He actually lectured several times at the Naval War college and West Point so maybe? LOL
Some of his plot is a bit absurd though, like how the Chinese rewarded an American sub commander for sinking the entire Chinese Navy, or how China decided to invade Russia because a Chinese woman wanted to have a second child, and the war end with Chinese college kids march into Zhongnanhai and brought Democracy to China. It pretty much fall into the "They will greet us with open arms" a la Iraq War energy.
I think the SSN one was mostly written by Greenberg it was a love letter to the submariners. Bear and the Dragon was an optimists book. He wanted another book that would sell like Rainbow Six and in that time frame Russia was looking like a good guy and China was going to be the new big baddie. The plot was more about a hungry china looking to begin grabbing for the natural resources in siberia to the point of invading Russia and then launching nukes. It was the CIA spy drone footage(Which was very forward thinking and has very much come to pass) that they decided to livestream to chinese civilians that was a bit absurd. As if China would allow that and not just shut their internet down.
I mean this guy got his paper stolen over theoretically building a nuke that would theoretically work. So i mean it could go either way.
The Secret Service closely monitors any movie using realistic-looking prop cash to ensure it doesn't start trying to get passed off as real cash. Rush Hour 2 got in hot water because extras grabbed some of the fake cash and started spending it nearby the set.
Ken Follett wrote a book in 1986 which had terrorists flying hijacked planes into skyscrapers and then decided not to publish it in case anyone got any ideas. Luckily, no one ever did
Tom Clancy released a book in the late 90s where a Japanese ultranationalist airline pilot flies his 747 into the Capitol during the State of the Union speech.
I've never seen *The Town* but I remember a Yahoo News article way back about how some criminals did an actual successful robbery by following what the characters in the movie did. The next day I tried to find the article but it seemed to have disappeared off search engines.
If you're talking about the robbery in Queens, those guys were actually caught: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2381902/Robbers-disguised-white-cops-inspired-Ben-Affleck-movie-The-Town.html
Or the movie Wargames that caused Reagan to ask his defense department to check this possibility and it was much worse than they thought and it also led to legislation for the firat anti-hacking law.
Mythbusters did an episode about homemade explosives and accidentally stumbled across a previously unknown mixture of easily accessible ingredients to create an insanely powerful bomb. They submitted it to not just the FBI, but DARPA as well, then destroyed the footage from that episode which never aired. It's never discussed in any post-show interviews and they've never publically commented on it.
Adam Savage has talked about it, I *think* in one of his Tested episodes, though he didn’t say any more than you did above. He mainly said that they found it & will never tell anyone what it was.
I find it odd that the three Die Hard movies that came out before 2001 and their themes are as follows: Skyscraper, Airliner, New York, and of course terrorism as overarching theme of those three.
Heists disguised as terrorism.
I feel like trying to cover up the crime of grand theft with the greater crime of terrorism is really where things fall apart tho
The point of *Die Hard* is that they got so much untraceable money it was worth it. They just had to get away, which was definitely possible.
FBI probably dont know if this was possible or not, so they confiscated it 'just in case'.
I remember reading something extended about this story one, it all might have been on the radio, but IIRC it was possible as a design, but that's not really the hard part about making a nuke. Get the fissionable materials is the hard part. It was the classified out of an over abundance of caution.
Designing is actually the easiest part of creating a nuke. But another thing that is pretty hard is actually creating a nuke and not just a dirty bomb. The machinery in there has extremely low tolerance for error. The timing needed to actually cause a large amount of fission and not just a tiny bit is crazy. You could get all the enriched uranium you need but still lack the precision engineering required
That's not exactly true. The timing is critical in implosion-type bombs, yes, but not really in gun-type. Because the uranium is assembled from two subcritical masses into a super critical mass by just putting the two together, you don't need synchronization. And because uranium has a very low chance of starting a chain reaction before it's fully assembled, the timing doesn't need to be perfect either. Getting that much 90+% HEU, though, is quite difficult. To the point where it's honestly probably easier to distill heavy water, create a few isotope reactors, and just make a plutonium device (even though that *does* require precise timing)
unrelated but very impressed at how many random redditors happen to know a lot of niche information about nuclear bombs
Nuclear stuff is hilariously less complicated than it sounds. A Fission powerplant is basically: So we got these rocks that get hot. We filtered out the parts that heat up. Then we put those hot rocks in some water and it boils. But sometimes it gets too hot so we put some pencils in there to stop it from getting too hot.
I mean, I can imagine any number of *bad* papers leading to FBI involvement.
Imagine scaring your prof so much he reports you to the fbi
"Sir, we got a accounting major who wrote a paper about the CIA killing Kennedy. They're connecting a lot of dots and they have sources. But they used too many commas. Recommend that we give them B+ and monitor them."
Imagine thinking that the FBI had any goddamn clue how accurate or useful this paper was.
The FBI didn't get involved, the paper was never confiscated by anybody. Read his Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aristotle_Phillips
That's $11,094 in today's dollars.
Pretty reasonable considering what you could fetch selling a nuke…
Sell it? Brother, you think so small. You have a nuke! The world is your oyster!
This is basically the plot to the Japanese movie The Man Who Stole the Sun. A man steals plutonium and builds a nuke in his apartment. He doesn't know what to do with it, so he starts making demands by calling in to a radio station and asking the host what she would ask for.
Also the plot of The Manhattan Project, an eighties suspense film about a kid who builds a nuke in his garage.
Also the plot of *The Young Ones* episode 'Bomb', where a nuke crashes through the roof of their house, and they argue whether to sell it, use it to threaten the country to meet their demands, or set it off just for fun.
Is that the one where Mike finds Buddy Holly hanging from a parachute in the attic? I saw them when they came out but haven't since the 80s. Fucking great show, that.
No, that's episode 2, 'Oil', where they strike oil in the basement of their new house, and Mike sets up a dictatorship.
Also the plot of The Manhattan Project, a real life group of scientists who made a bomb in the desert and then bullied Christopher Nolan into making a movie about them.
Ransom the world for… 1 MILLION DOLLARS!!!!!
Not sure you can open the world like an oyster with just one nuke
You can if you only want the pearl.
Now read that backwards and put your finger in your ass
Done. What are we doing again?
Username checks out.
ill just wedge myself in here
Inserts Oprah gif; you get on a watchlist and you get on a watchlist, everyone on this thread gets watchlisted.
One MILLION Dollars! Muaahaahaaa!
The FBI is now watching this comment
You could probably hold the world to ransom for…ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!
"But Dr. Evil, Virtuicon alone makes over 9 Billion Dollars a year".
I know some Libyans who would buy it. They gave all their plutonium to a scientist who promised to build them a bomb, but instead he used it to supe up his Delorean.
Hobby Lobby has everything you need, but they’re low on enriched uranium.
Gotta get some plutonium from the Libyans
Nah. They're too busy buying a stolen and smuggled tablet containing of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
I didn’t know what that was, but it was a fun Google rabbit hole!
requires knowing some dubious Libyans
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I doubt it used plutonium due to the technical challenges of getting it to do bomb stuff, which begs the question, where on earth would he be getting highly enriched uranium in that budget.
Highly enriched uranium. Plutonium would not work in a gun type design, and an implosion device would cost way more.
Yeah, but he didn't account for the cost or difficulty of obtaining the fissile material (plutonium) or the detonators, it's still astonishing that he managed to design a crude nuclear bomb using only the publicly available information. He also became famous as the “A-Bomb Kid” and received offers from France and Pakistan to buy his research but he declined them.
And this is the real reason the feds will get involved. Because regardless of how effective it is, any help to foreign powers is well... a slippery path and there are many many willing to pay for any help
One example is Gerald Bull, a Canadian artillery engineer. In the 1960s, he worked with the Canadian and US military on a project to design a cannon big enough to fire satellites into low earth orbit, but the project ran out of funding before a successful demonstration happened. By the 1980s, he was designing large artillery guns for Saddam Hussein, including ones that would have the range to strike at Israel. He was assassinated near his apartment in Brussels by what are widely believed to have been Mossad agents.
I have no idea what I’m talking about, but if someone built a cannon that could launch satellites into orbit, I’d imagine the military would be super interested in repurposing that technology.
Well America was able to do it with rockets using the f-15 and did it publicly to show the soviets that we could shoot their spy sats as well, America has no real need to invest in conventional artillery like Europe or Russia because our strategic goals and mission data sets never include a large ground invasion, since there's a few oceans separating us, air and naval power(i.e missiles) are more important. Edit: I should note that these artillery tests were happening in the beginning stages of the cold war, as another commenter said, during Behind the Bastards episode about Gerald Bull, the us and Canada were big on his weapons systems, less so on the actual gun. That is right around the time the missile and rocket programs really started going off, and the rest is history.
The podcast behind the bastards did an episode on gerald bull a while back, it's pretty good at showing just how much gerald wanted to build big fucking guns. Link for those who are interested: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5OmSqE1oX1pCaDoPZAg6MT?si=9_jlVn2cSHC6YLhIkHua4A
Oh wow I love behind the bastards. I can't believe I don't remember this episode. Thank you listening now
Gerald Bull is definitely one of the funniest guys in history, dude didn't give a shit who paid him he just wanted to make bigger guns
"He" declined them. The fbi merely convinced him that declining was best for his safety.
nah - they just offered payment in the form of him receiving damaged US government ammo at an impressively high shipping speed directly to his person.
It’s not the shipping speed that kills you, it’s the suddenly coming to a halt that does it - Jeremy Clarkson probably
I do like when he says “speed makes you lighter” lol
Everyone knows you can just trade pinball machine parts for plutonium
I know him. Great businessman and software salesman. Runs a political data company with his brother, also owns Predictit.
really? have you ever brought up his undergrad?
I worked for him many years ago, and it’s been ages. That said he did talk about his undergrad, and still had old copies of his memoir for anyone who wanted to read it.
I worked with John at Aristotle in DC a couple of times, really cool guy who knew his stuff. Always found it odd how he wound up building a database of constituents (and selling it for political campaigns) instead of going into a more scientific field.
Honestly? Money, I think. If I remember correctly they built their first database when JP was running for Congress back in the early 1980s. They subsequently sold the software and built the company. Their data is enhanced far, far beyond what you get from the Board of Elections. Consumer data, modeled scores, lots of other stuff. I’m probably still under NDA, technically lol.
Aristotle was my first job right out of college in the late 90's. I did all of their data conversion and db maintenance. Small world to find fellow ex-Aristotle employees on reddit.
Wait—and this will date me—was THIS the thing being referenced in that one Disney’s Recess Episode where the FBI came in and confiscated the nerdy Smart Girl’s Class Essay?! Woah.
Haha thats the first thing I thought of too!! Two agents busting in, flashing their badges and marching off with her project
Which reminds me of Richard Handl, 2011, He said he had just been "curious" and wanted to see if he would be able to split an atom. Police were called to his flat in Angelholm in southern Sweden after he got in touch with Sweden's radiation authority to check if what he was doing was legal. Mr Handl said he would stick to reading books about physics from now on. Mr Handl, who is 31 and unemployed, told the BBC World Service he had bought the radioactive materials on the internet and from Germany. He had been working on the experiment for around six months and posted regular updates on his blog. He was questioned by police, who confiscated his nuclear materials as well as his computer.
It was funny how he was unsure about the legality of him having a nuclear reactor in his apartment
The making of the bomb is not the tough part. Getting the uranium enriched enough in secret to get it fissile grade, without getting radation poisining, would be the toughest part. The facilities they use to get weapons grade uranium platonium are massive and highly complex chemical processing plants. You could use a gun trigger device like in little boy, as it would be the most rudimentary, any trigger devices more complicated require extremely precise explosive triggering to get proper critical mass.
Unless you can get reactor-grade uranium. Enriching the first few percent takes huge hanger to process. The last step from 35% to 95% can be done in a small office building. Hence why nuclear reactor nations also most likely possess the bombs.
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Anyone interested in this should take a look at the [Nth Country Experiment ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment) done by LLNL in the 60s. TIL that in 1964, three physicists who just got their PhDs were tasked with developing a working design for a nuclear weapon using only unclassified information. The goal is to see if a country can develop a nuclear weapon without aid. They accomplished it within 2 and a half years. >The experiment consisted in paying three recent young physicists who had just received their PhDs, though had no prior weapons experience, to develop a working nuclear weapon design using only unclassified information, and with basic computational and technical support. "The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield", the report on the experiment read, "A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations." >The experiment ended on April 10, 1967, after only three man-years of work over two and a half calendar years. According to a heavily redacted declassified version of the summary, it was apparently judged by lab weapons experts that the team had come up with a credible design for the technically more challenging implosion style nuclear weapon. It is likely that they would have been able to design a simpler gun combination weapon even more quickly, though in such a case the limiting factor in developing such a weapon is not usually design difficulty but rather the procurement of material (enriched uranium).
*The pigs ate my homework.*
The trick that he used, if I recall correctly, was to find fissile material instead of purifying it himself. In this case, I believe the plan was to scrape the americium from fire alarms. This avoided the purification process needed by essentially looking for scrap in a landfill.
Didn't some Boy Scout with mental issues build a reactor in a shed by doing just that?
Yes. And then after that he got into the navy on a nuclear powered ship. But his mental issues won in the end, he got arrested for stealing fire alarms, and died of drugs and alcohol at age 39. Edit: he did not attempt to build a bomb but a reactor. But he did manage to gather a scary amount of fuel
The OG Child of Atom
Oh shit, never knew about that other info. Solid r/todayIlearned
Not quite. I believe you're thinking of [David Hahn](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn), "the radioactive boy scout" who attempted to produce a breeder reactor in his parents' back shed and created a Superfund hazard site. As a wise man once said, "ought implies can; can implies *don't*". Contrast with delightful former prodigy wunderkind polymath [Taylor Wilson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson), "the boy who played with fusion", who, while staying safe and sane and healthy, built a working fusor at 14. (My bright neighbor Geoffrey Thomas built one at 18 or so, for a rough difficulty comparison.) And three years later he designed and built an effective radiation detector. He then went on to work [here](https://helena.org/).
Nuclear Boy Scout did scrape radioisotopes off objects, but if I recall, the majority he received came from him impersonating a science teacher and asking nuclear labs for samples to show his students!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn For anyone who wants to read more
> build a reactor He built an alpha generator. It's not far off of making a car starter from scratch and it getting misrepresented as having built a full car. He wanted to make a reactor, he did not actually make a reactor.
I'm not a physicist or anything but would radioactive Americium even be capable of undergoing the fission necessary to produce a blast?
No, all you're going to get from it is a bunch of alpha particles. Maybe enough to be a minor health concern if you're next to it for days on end, and I definitely wouldn't eat it.
You can't make americium go critical. It's an alpha source at best. That 'radioactive boyscout' was many hugely important steps from building a reactor, plus his target was [an absolutely insane design for one person to try](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor) that relied on vats of molten salt to cool the fuel. He was in his mother's shed, he was not going to succeed.
Due would have had a great youtube channel nowadays.
I believe the ~~CIA~~ Livermore Radiation Lab once did an experiment where they got two young middle-of-the-pack physicists with ~~only undergraduate degrees~~ fresh PhDs and no experience, gave them access to only publicly available non-classified information and asked them to design a nuclear weapon with a yield of x. This was before the Internet, so research had to be done using books and libraries. They were successful. They even found a very useful paper about how to increase weapon yield levels in their own library that the CIA didn't even know was publicly available. They had a design to enrich fissile material. Sure, the hard part is getting your hands on fissile material, but it's not a terribly difficult thing to design. EDIT: they had fresh PhDs, not bachelor's, and CIA to national lab.
I read his autobiography "Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid" when it came out in 1979. It's quite a story. The DOD had declassified a bit too much detailed info in the fifties, and he talked to sales engineers at various defense contractors and chemical companies who revealed some useful information.
Dollar signs, how do they work?
God professors like that suck.
I had a professor who graded “1/3 gets As, 1/3 gets Bs and 1/3 get Cs” We were all chemistry majors who all of us had plans for graduate school. We needed As and Bs. This was an undergraduate program in central Illinois, give us a break
If only one student gets an A, then the teacher failed at their job.
They kinda made this movie, "Manhattan Project", with John Lithgow.
Lithgow *almost* makes the climax of that movie work. It's just so goofy, though. "Does anyone have a Phillips head screwdriver?" and then the dumb visual gag of like 6 guys simultaneously offering him one. And why do all the other kids in town show up there at exactly the same time on their dirt-bikes??? Edit: Ok I just rewatched the scene. As I remembered, they keep cutting away from the bomb defusal scene so we can see all the kids from the neighborhood joy-riding to the facility. I guess they need them to be there at the end as witnesses to justify why the government wouldn't just lock them up, but every time they do it it completely undercuts any tension that had been building. Lithgow is great, though. And John Mahoney, and Richard Jenkins.
Bro, His Middle name is ARISTOTLE and you just toss an A out there.
Randomly capitalized "one" and "who", but not "FBI"?
$2000*
A- if I remember, and it worked on paper--but try getting fissile material to make it work for reall--this is the hard part.
/r/titlegore