Count Down
The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons
Sarah Scoles . . 2024 . . Beaverton Lib 355.8251
264 pages including references and index. I lost interest around page 70. Perhaps I will try again after I read the other thousand books in my incoming pile.
The focus is on stockpile maintenance. Electronics upgrades, new circuit technology replacing old unavailable devices, But the main problem is radioactive decay of the "pits", the vaguely described balls of plutonium/uranium/?? that radioactively decay into inert or fission damping elements. Very slow decay; the pits probably work fine, like the last US weapons tested in 1992, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty signed by Clinton in 1996, but not ratified by the Senate, or by China, Russia, US, Iran, and Israel .
The subject matter is necessarily vague, because the most "interesting" information is classified. Hence my loss of interest. Some pointers to other books and documents that I might read someday.
p37 Nuclear Rites by Hugh Gusterson, a 1996 ethnography of scientists at LLNL.
p37 Nuclear Matters Handbook revised 2020
p58 El Capitan exascale supercomputer at LLNL
p60 LLNL(?) QSCOUT quantum computing testbed based on trapped ions, five qubits in 2023
p144 Cobalt Magnet nuclear security exercise
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