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Nuclear Nose Cones Mistakenly Shipped to Taiwan
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Mar 26, 2008 09:56 AM
from the it's-ok-it's-only-our-military dept.
from the it's-ok-it's-only-our-military dept.
Reservoir Hill writes "The Pentagon announced that the United States had mistakenly shipped to Taiwan four electrical fuses designed for use on intercontinental ballistic missiles, but has since recovered them. The mistaken shipment to Taiwan did not include nuclear materials, although the fuses are linked to the triggering mechanism in the nose cone of a Minuteman nuclear missile. Taiwanese authorities notified U.S. officials of the mistake, but it was not clear when the notification was made. An examination of the site in Taiwan where the components had been stored after delivery indicated that they had not been tampered with. The fuses had been in four shipping containers sent in March 2005 from F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo., to a Defense Logisitics Agency warehouse at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. It was then in the logistics agency's control and was shipped to Taiwan "on or around" August 2006, according to a memo from Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordering Navy Adm. Kirkland H. Donald to investigate the incident."
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Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nosecones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nosecones? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Nosecones? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Nosecones? (Score:5, Insightful)
The electronics and detonation systems used in nuclear bombs are very advanced, and very difficult to get right. A large portion of the time spent developing a nuclear weapon is devoted to the detonation electronics.
Mistakenly handing over a crate of said electronics would give a nation a significant shortcut toward developing their own nuclear weapons.
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Re:Nosecones? (Score:5, Funny)
Fiendishly clever, I say.
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Real-politick and espionage (Score:5, Interesting)
If US gives ROC weapons, and nobodies knows, there is no deterrent, we violate agreements, and generally encourage proliferation.
If US just plants a news story about the parts, then PRC doesn't know, "shipping error" creates plausible deniability. PRC can't make a scene, but can wonder, does the ROC have a nuke now.
PRC doesn't care about being depopulated, but 4-10 nuclear weapons might do a number on those shiny new factories that they are building.
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Re:Nosecones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, we knew of the mistake almost as soon as it happened. It's just that we only recently finished processing the paperwork. The next step is to file the paperwork that gets those fuses sent back over here. ETA is somewhere in 2015.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The article I jus
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When they say "fuse" are they referring to a piece of solder or lead designed to melt when subjected to an overcurrent, or (as you imply) is it something more dangerous and sinister?
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What we sent Taiwan were electronic strings for nuclear bombs.
Re:Nosecones? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's 20 years of development.
Why do you think we still have these nose cones, anyway? The US has not come all that far since the 60s in terms of nuclear weapon design. By the 60s we were already detonating fusion bombs, and I guarantee you that the designs and electronics used in the 60s to create hydrogen bombs will still work today.
I don't think anyone would care whether the megaton hydrogen bomb just detonated in their city was based on 1960s designs or 1980s designs
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Re:Nosecones? (Score:5, Funny)
And I thought I had bad timing with smileys.
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Re:Nosecones? (Score:4, Insightful)
So yeah, they should have better controls over where our nuclear tech is shipped, but in this particular case there's no problem.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And don't even start with Chinese that "Taiwan is a country" or they'll treat you as enemy of state. But then saying that Quebec is an independent nation from Canada would be similar. Though in Canada a lot of people would just ignore you
Now, if you state that Tibet should be an independen
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Well, they had them in the 1970s. That's either 30 years ahead or 10 years behind, depending on how you look at it.
Also, we're talking about electrical fuses here. An electrical fuse is a bit of wire or something similar that gets hot and melts when you put too much current through it. You'll find the details in your physics textbook. The
Re:Nosecones? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know the details of this particular weapon, but nuclear ignition fuses can be very sophisticated. In an implosion-style weapon, you've got a bunch of detonators arranged in a pattern on the outside of a sphere of high explosive. It's of utmost importance that the explosive shock wave hit the center of the sphere from all sides at pretty much exactly the same time, to maximize compression on the nuclear material. There are two things that have to happen for this to be the case:
1) Explosive lenses. As each detonator fires, it creates an expanding sphere of detonation throughout the high explosive. All of these spheres will meet in the middle as the entire explosive detonates, but it's a messy and irregular shock front. You instead want a perfectly spherical shock front to all hit the nuclear material (itself a sphere) simultaneously. The most straightforward way to do this is to have two different explosives which detonate at different velocities. Basically directly underneath each detonator (the point that the expanding spherical shock wave would naturally hit first), you've got to slow the explosion down by using a lower-velocity explosive, and in between the detonators (the point that the expanding spherical shock waves would naturally hit last), you've got to speed it up by using a higher-velocity explosive. By precisely calculating and machining the interface between the two types of explosives, you can control how long it takes the shock wave to reach the nuclear material at each point -- ideally, exactly simultaneously.
2) Precise detonation. If one of the detonators fires a couple of milliseconds late, you've got a lopsided shock wave which leads to much poorer compression of the nuclear material. Poor compression leads to low yield or even no nuclear ignition at all. But you've got perhaps dozens of detonators, and making them all go off within microseconds of each other is highly non-trivial. It takes quite a bit of sophistication to time dozens of explosions to all happen at more-or-less precisely the same time, and not only is it hard, nuclear bombs are pretty much the only case in which you ever have to time things this precisely. And that means that short of specialized research into this exact problem, you're not going to have the technology to do it.
The devices which were inappropriately shipped are a solution to problem #2. Problem #1 is actually quite a bit easier -- the underlying math and science is quite straightforward (as these things go). Solve #1 and #2, and you've got the ability to create a perfectly spherical shock wave. Put a an appropriate sphere of plutonium in the middle of a sufficiently powerful spherical shock wave, and you've got a nuclear bomb.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nosecones? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I am curious about is exactly WHAT the electronics here consisted of. Are we talking about the system that senses altitude and triggers the detonation sequence (which would be serious enough), or was this the actual "X-unit" electronics package that fires all the separate detonators on the explosive lenses to compress the plutonium pit?
If the latter is actually what they shipped out (complete with the krytron switches, high energy capacitors, etc.), then some heads REALLY need to roll over this one. The media isn't being all that specific about what is actually involved here, either because the DoD isn't telling them, or because of the usual "dumbing down" of anything that might be considered too technical for Joe Sixpack to care about.
Parent
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The editor that put this blatant sensationalism on the front page should be exposed to radioactive material to get the point across that calling something "Nuclear Nose Cones" when refering to an electric firing pin is not journalism and has a better place in checkout stand tabloids.
Re:Nosecones? (Score:5, Informative)
FTA:
"The fuses were manufactured for use on a Minuteman strategic nuclear missile and are linked to the triggering mechanism in the nose cone, but they contain no nuclear materials."
it was also in the summary if you even got that far.
Also in the same article:
"Four of the cone-shaped fuses were shipped to Taiwanese officials in fall 2006 instead of the helicopter batteries they had ordered."
These were not the "Nuclear Nose Cones" themselves but cone shaped fuses that are "linked" to the complex triggering system that makes up most of the nose cone volume. This is how CBS refers to them: "... four electrical fuses for nose cone assemblies for ICBMs" and if you take a second to look up the way these things work you will see that the majority of the system is not the fuses themselves but the triggering system.
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disparity... (Score:5, Funny)
what gives? this is worse than the xmas gifts i get at work....
Re:disparity... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Taiwan, not the PRC. They make the computers around which your nerdly life revolves.
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
This is Taiwan, not the PRC. They make the computers around which your nerdly life revolves.
ROC vs. PRC (Score:3, Insightful)
Conversely Taiwan [wikipedia.org] would argue that China [wikipedia.org] is part of it.
Misleading Title: "fuses" not "nose cones" (Score:2, Insightful)
This is terrible (Score:2)
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Why is this reported? (Score:5, Informative)
I can't seem to figure out why it was being reported at all. The story as it's published is "nothing much happened, somebody filled out the shipping form wrong, we returned it all to sender." So in whose interest is this story being reported?
It would be a reasonable story to spread as cover if the shipment had been intentional and China found out about it (or if there had been, say, six fuses shipped and four returned); or it could be a useful story to ratchet up tensions with China before the Olympics (to whoever's benefit). Thing is, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I don't really buy that without it being more obvious whose interest it serves; but if it's just a "gotcha" story talking about how the US military screwed up, then the shots fired in the Suez [google.com] might be a more interesting one (especially since as of yesterday afternoon the USAF was denying that anybody got hurt).
So, in short, this nuke-fuse story is weird, and I can't figure out why it's getting reported.
(Full disclosure: I wish Taiwan had nukes, to make sure China stays polite and on its side of the Strait.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The fact that any part of such a thing was mishandled is a big deal, because it validates the probability that the dangerous parts can be mishandled.
You think it was a couple of irrelevant parts. To the process involved in controlling them, this was an "escape" from the process, and the process has to be re-engineered to ensure such things can not happen at all, because next time it may not be the mundane stuff that gets lost
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1) This involves NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
2) The *next* time we send nuclear weapon components to the wrong address, the recipient might not be nice enough to send them back. And they might wind up somewhere we wouldn't like.
Re:Why is this reported? (Score:5, Funny)
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Or even worse, if you sent nuclear weapons components to the wrong address and they put them all together and THEN sent them back.....express.
Re:Why is this reported? (Score:5, Interesting)
Taiwan has just had an election and Chen Shui Bian [wikipedia.org] who was basically in favour of formal independence (which would cause China to attack) has been replaced with Ma Ying Jeou [wikipedia.org] who's policy is "no independence, no unification and no war" and trying to increase economic ties with China and possibly sign some sort of peace treaty. The US strongly supports this since they don't want a war between large but totalitarian China and small but democratic Taiwan which they might get dragged into. Taiwan elects its own leaders, has its own army and so on anyway, and is a rich free country, quite unlike China. Formal independence wouldn't actually do any good, but it might do a lot of bad by triggering a full on war.
No I've no idea what the story behind all this, but I guess the US and/or Taiwan have decided to disclose this rather than risk China finding out about it later. Taiwan having nuclear weapons is one of the things that would cause the China to attack [wikipedia.org]. Since China is in scheming mode rather than bullying mode because of the Taiwanese election result, maybe now is as good a time to make the announcement as any.
Even when the US still had diplomatic relations with Taiwan instead of China, they forced Taiwan to dismantle some nuclear facilities [globalsecurity.org] to reduce the risk that they provoke a war with China. Despite the change in diplomatic recognition, which was forced on them by a vote in the UN General Assembly [virginia.edu], the US still views Taiwan as a protege and would defend them if China attacked, unless they provoked that attack by declaring formal independence.
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Correction (Score:2)
How long did it take to get them back? (Score:2, Insightful)
Expected news considering that (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, I'm amazed that we don't find more shipping accidents. A CIA plane crash lands with a buttload of cocaine on it, nuclear fuses get shipped to a foreign country like lost luggage on an airliner? Rumors and stories everywhere of secretly selling nuclear secrets to now declared enemies of the USA. Where does it stop? Ooops, Sorry Los Angeles. We mistakenly sent that suitcase bomb to Iran. Brown was supposed to handle that, but Columbian based DruglordCo came in at a cheaper price.
In other news, the US government looks foolish for trying to stop Iran's non-weapons nuclear program with war if need be, while misplacing EVERY FUCKING THING Iran needs to build a bomb, through some shipping miscommunication...
Fuck, I give up. Either the Whitehouse and government is full of evil geniuses or they are incompetent as to be less useful than tits on a boar hog as my grandfather used to say. How can they pull off the media circus they did to get us into war with Iraq but clumsily admit "oh, yes, we made a mistake with some nuclear weapons stuff, sorry about that" ?!?!?!?!?!?
Isn't Taiwan the good China? (Score:3, Funny)
Funny how many ppl believe it (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Yeah, big today, gone tomorrow (Score:3, Insightful)
It's no longer cool to be in the nuclear military (Score:5, Informative)
The US has been fighting conventionally ever since the first Gulf War - even after that war ended, there was quite a bit of combat activity to enforce Iraq's no-fly zone. With the current wars, this has resulted in military personnel regarding conventional fighting as the way to get ahead in the military.
Let me find you a link...
"Fuze" is probably a small radar (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's the "fuse" in the "nose cone", it's probably the radar proximity fuze, used to detonate a nuclear weapon at a specific height above ground. This is essential only for ICBMs intended for use against hardened targets, where the detonation has to occur at just the right height to maximize the blast effect against something like a missile silo lid.
If you're delivering your bomb in a Ryder truck, this component is unnecessary.
ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a non-issue. Something got mixed up when we were shipping them some batteries, and we shipped them some fuses instead. And they returned them with no problems. This story keeps on cropping up, and it's just sensationalism... especially using the word "nuclear" in the headline in this particular case. For shame.
They should have used the CIA (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/jan/05/energy.g2 [guardian.co.uk]
On paper, Merlin was supposed to stunt the development of Tehran's nuclear programme by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong technical path. The CIA believed that once the Iranians had the blueprints and studied them, they would believe the designs were usable and so would start to build an atom bomb based on the flawed designs.
The Russian studied the blueprints the CIA had given him. Within minutes of being handed the designs, he had identified a flaw. "This isn't right," he told the CIA officers gathered around the hotel room. "There is something wrong." His comments prompted stony looks, but no straight answers from the CIA men. No one in the meeting seemed surprised by the Russian's assertion that the blueprints didn't look quite right, but no one wanted to enlighten him further on the matter, either.
In fact, the CIA case officer who was the Russian's personal handler had been stunned by his statement. During a break, he took the senior CIA officer aside. "He wasn't supposed to know that," the CIA case officer told his superior. "He wasn't supposed to find a flaw."
"Don't worry," the senior CIA officer calmly replied. "It doesn't matter."
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