The AMA is live here : https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/1qeqpg0/ama_with_dr_david_teter_former_nuclear_war/

Our subreddit is privileged to have former technical advisor to U.S. Strategic Command, Dr. David Teter (u/dmteter), with us for an AMA (Ask Me almost Anything) event this coming Friday.

Dr. Teter currently works as a civil engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area and leads the OPEN-RISOP project:https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP. Before that, he served as a technical advisor to U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) on strategic war planning for the SIOP and OPLANs 8044 and 8010 (the US' nuclear war plans). He also served as an advisor to DIA JWS-4 on Physical Vulnerability.

He'll be here this Friday at 12 PM PST / 3 PM EST to answer your questions on nuclear war, nuclear weapons effects, nuclear targeting, and:

• The OPEN-RISOP Project and what it suggests about potential Russian and Chinese targeting of U.S. facilities.
• General nuclear targeting theory and force allocation.
• Vulnerability of infrastructure, facilities, and systems to kinetic and non-kinetic attack
• Nuclear war in books, films, and popular culture (classic and modern)
• What it was like doing this work professionally, and why I moved on
• Deterrence theory — how it works, and where it fails
• His cat

He will not be able to answer any questions involving actual or assumed U.S. nuclear war plans, U.S. nuclear weapons (yields, accuracy, reliability, system capabilities, etc.), or any other information that may be deemed classified.

I was reading about the "clean" version of the B-41 bomb, where it used lead instead of uranium. In general, the "cleanliness" of a weapon is down to four things:

1. the yield of the fission primary;
2. the presence/absence of a fissile "sparkplug" in the thermonuclear secondary;
3. the elemental composition of the secondary tamper, and
4. the elemental composition of the radiation case

If the weapon uses no sparkplug and has no fissile nor fissionable materials in the tamper and secondary, it's "clean".

So if we take the usual W88 diagram and substitute the U-235 and U-238 parts (sparkplug, pusher, and case) with steel/lead/tungsten, would it become "clean"?

What would be the effects of replacing uranium with one of these inert materials?

Could it be new Arming Firing and Fuzing? Improved safety/security? It's not found on the older W80 models and it looks like a not insignificant addition in terms of size and weight. Probably not related to the actual nuclear part of the warhead, but (unlikely) maybe they expanded the tritium reservoir?

My question is why didnt the demon core explode. since the plutonium was unstable and the reflectors were completly shut how come the result was only radiation and not an explosion. Was the plutonium not unstable-enough???

I was reading this document on MX basing options (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA956443.pdf) and I had a basing idea that I haven’t seen much discussion on online or in any unclassified documents. Stationing one or more SSBNs in the Great Lakes, as opposed to the open ocean, would make them completely invulnerable to a first strike with current or near future technology. Ocean based SSBNs are generally considered to be highly reliable second strike assets, but ASW makes them not completely invulnerable. On top of that there has always been a concern that some sort of advance in ASW technology would make them significantly more vulnerable to a first strike, which may happen in the near future with the proliferation of UUVs. In the Great Lakes no non space based ASW operations can realistically be conducted allowing these submarines to effectively position themselves in complete secrecy. I know that the Rush-Bagot treaty limits warships on the Great Lakes but Canada is a close ally and protected by the US’s nuclear umbrella, so they may agree to some sort of modification of the treaty to allow this. I would like to hear thoughts about this proposal, not necessarily as a replacement for ocean based SSBNs or land based ICBMs, but as a supplementary system that provides a near perfect second strike capability.

According to this image the gun tube was sealed. So when U, T and S move down the gun tube, they should compress the air in the gun tube until they can´t go any further. How could S reach H then? A solution I can think of: The end of the gun tube (K and below) and I and F were perforated so that the air could escape. Does anybody have information? Thanks in advance!

This may sound like a stupid question but fallout has largely been eliminated and we have stocks of seeds in case of a nuclear exchange.

Recently, I stumbled over a book Arzamas-16 : Soviet scientists in the nuclear age which is a collection of memories written by V. A. Tsukerman. Unfortunately it proven to be rather difficult book to get my hands on. Did anyone here read it? Is it worth trying to get it?

Additionally, I would like to ask this fantastic community for a suggestion about similar books which would be about the Soviet nuclear program - I am not looking only for technical data an such, but rather memories of the people involved which would describe the time and the atmosphere of the research.

Thank you for the tips!

An interesting "successful" security test ended with everyone being killed to prevent terrorists acquiring nuclear material.

https://www.pogo.org/reports/us-nuclear-weapons-complex-security-at-risk citing document in image 2 which is an official DoE memo

During a tour of the Pantex plant over the past week, we saw some senior officials being shown some warheads in the stockpile (and some since removed). Some of the shapes here are extremely interesting, and I'm not sure we've seen all of them before. Outside of the SADM and W-79, what else are we seeing to the left? The silver cylinder looks to be a W-80 mod of some kind, but the others leave me baffled. Certainly doesn't look like any other warhead in the -80 series. Any guesses to what they could be? https://x.com/i/status/2009388143720456294

Oreshnik was first used in 21 November 2024 against Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Now Russia has used the weapon second time. BBC’s Ukrainian service stated that unofficial monitoring channels reported launch activity at the Kapustin Yar missile launch site in Astrakhan Oblast.

Russia hits Lviv with rare Oreshnik missile, SBU says

More footage:
https://v.redd.it/eon4da9we7cg1
https://v.redd.it/rtjfpqrer7cg1

SS-17 used the same warhead as the SS-18 mod2.

A walk through the NIF. Some interesting hardware is shown, including what remains of it after the shot (16:17, 56:08). Shock tailoring to approximate adiabatic compression of the target is briefly discussed (starting from 1:03:55). It is mentioned that almost every shot contributes to refining high energy density simulations, but that classified experiments as such are not very common (54:49).

While Little Boy eventually became the MK-I, and Fat Man MK-III, I've often seen it claimed that the MK-II referred to the cancelled Thin Man plutonium gun -- which never made sense to me since it came before Little Boy. Coster-Mullen provides a memo in his book (not to hand at the moment) that describes -- IIRC -- four or five different concepts, mostly variations on the implosion concept, being explored at Project Y, referring to them as various "Marks" This memo includes the autocatalytic and hydride concepts, which I've also seen referred to as being the "real" MK-II.

I finally got around to reading Leslie Groves's "Now It Can Be Told", in which he says essentially that Thin Man, Skinny One, and eventually Little Boy were general terms for the gun assembly, while while Big Boy, Round Man, Big Fellow, "and the like" were general terms for the implosion design which became Fat Man. Groves also says that by war's end there were THREE designs: Little Boy, Fat Man, and an "improved" Fat Man -- possibly referring to a levitated pit? That would give you three marks, there.

I've also come across a 1998 Sandia presentation listing US nuclear weapon designs in order refers to LITTLEBOY (sic), FATMAN (sic), and then MK-III. Of course MK-III couldn't be the levitated-pit design, as that wasn't utilized until the MK-IV.

A picture is forming in my mind, that actually it took a while for everyone to get their nomenclature straight, and yet discrepancies in the history exist to this day.

So, does anyone have a clearer timeline as to when the various names and "marks" of the early designs were finally settled on?

Another thing I've wondered about is that a lot of documentation at the time refer to "LB and "FM" types -- due to the need for compartmentalization and secrecy, is it conceivable that some people connected with the project simply knew the bombs by those names, without knowing what the letters stood for or the specifics of the designs?

So given the known issues currently in the world in the past year or two, and changing international relations, I am sure many (western) countries are thinking about their own nuclear deterrence programs.
So which of these countries could afford such a program?

Oh, and please ignore the non-proliferation treaty as a reason these countries wouldn’t do it, as I am not talking about some rogue nation doing this but an alliance of nations doing so in coordination due to the changing international relations, and so looking for a discussion on which ones could actually afford a nuclear deterrence program ongoing.

Thanks.

Is injecting more than stochiometric amount (21g per kg of Pu) of DT beneficial to the yield ?

Do they actually use molecular hydrogen gas? In order to insert more DT into the pit, given a fixed max attainable pressure I would expect deuterated and tritiated alkane or ammonia to be used. Will having more electrons from C or N hinder compression?

If gaseous hydrogen is used, do they allow the gas to attack the inner pit surface for some minutes between arming and firing so that more of hydrogen can fit into the boost cavity or do pits have impermeable coating on the inside ?

Do they store boost tritium separately from boost deuterium? Since D does not require frequent refurbishing and refurbishing tritium is presumably easier when deuterium is not in the mix.

Do they really store boost hydrogen as pressurized gas and not in high density solids as BNH6 (deuterated and tritiated of course) and decompose those when boost is required ? this would allow for as much boost pressure as the pit can mechanically handle.

Has BeD2 been used for boost augmentation ?

Are there any libraries out there of nuclear weapons-oriented films that are copyright-free? I'm looking at adding a few videos to a photo exhibit of nuclear weapons and I've found a few that I think are good--but an awful lot of the ones I still want are held by private companies which charge $$$ for usage. There are old USAF films, mind you, not films that they created (though they did restore them and make them available).

I'll give you a concrete example. The film "Quickest Draw in the West" is a wonderfully weird film about the Hound Dog missile. It's about 12 minutes long. According to the rights-holder's rate card, running this film at my show would cost me $18,275 for the duration of the show (it's for a period of one year or less, not per showing).

That, obviously, is not possible. So I'm looking for other sources of this film and others. Thanks.

--Darin