The Material So Classified We Forgot How to Make It
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- Опубликовано: 10 май 2024
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If they had found someone who actually wrote it down, they probably would have thanked them profusely and then sent them to prison.
prob why they all claimed to have forgotten how to make it
@@ItsASkelley Complex chemical formulas aren't exaxtly easy to memorize
Nay, OP is right, might have claimed that the person has been leaking the info for making bombs since it can be remembered...
@@toahero5925 well knowing the molecular structure and composition is one thing but synthesizing it is what is patentable.
@@Shinobubu You really think the government would detail how to make it in a patent?
FOGBANK seems a very good name for something everyone has forgotten.
Can't remember it already.
Fr
Yeahhh, seems purposeful-
MIB neuralyzer is real.
I haven't the foggiest...
Fun fact : this isn't the first time that imperfection is actually better.
I don't know if it's true, but there's a story about the Japanese Shinkansen and how it couldn't reach French TGV speed without tearing its catenary (the cable that sits above electric train lines). They sent some engineers to France to study how we did it, there weren't many differences until one engineer pointed out that our catenaries weren't built with perfect spacing, whereas Japanese precision made them space each pole at the exact same distance, increasing the resonance effect when a high-speed train goes through until it tore down the catenary.
So, French clumsiness actually is not a defect but a necessary part of the design. "It's a feature".
Side effect of allowing them to drink wine and eat smelly cheeses. The engineers were inebriated.
Actually, both trains have the same top speed: 300 KPH. The Shinkansen gets the crown as the fastest train in the world because it spends more time at its top speed compared to the TGV. The Shinkansen is also an Electric Multiple Unit (EMU), meaning the electric motors are distributed throughout the train, instead of being clustered under the locomotive and adjoining passenger car axle, which the TGV does. This gives the Shinkansen a higher acceleration rate than the TGV.
Same thing killed SONGS. They ordered new steam generators in Japan, but due to extremely high accuracy new pipes were made - they went into resonance when operated at full power. Manufacturing imperfections and little lower tolerances would dampen vibrations (or just one more level of supporting grate). However, second replacement was blocked by so-called "environmentalists"
@@jordonfreeman166 Actually the French LGV Est and Japanese Tohoku Shinkansen run at 320 km/h. But yes their in-service speed is the same.
What they were probably referring to was the world record attempts. The Shinkansen achieved a record speed of 443 km/h in 1996, which failed to beat the TGV's 515 km/h record from 1990.
France beat their own record again in 2007, reaching 575 km/h which remains the rail speed record for wheeled vehicles. Japan holds the record for Maglev trains at 603 km/h.
Same thing happened to Rolls-Royce when they began building their own GM Hydra-Matic transmissions under license. They hand-polished the internal components' surfaces of the first ones and wondered why they drove horribly, it turns out GM wasn't doing that just because they couldn't put that amount of hand work into a Pontiac at its' price, they were doing it because certain surfaces needed a rough finish for the fluid dynamics to work right.
This happened to a customer I had.. They had a very specific production process that allowed them to make parts better than their competators. They were bought out and as they were winding down production and transfering everything to the new owners, they realized they had run out of a key component that they used for making these parts. They also realized that they had nothing written down about how to make it. There was one machinist still there and they found out he knew how it was made. They asked him to make some and he said"sure". They then asked him to write down the process and he said"no". The company that bought them was also a customer of mine. Last time I visited he was still coming in on a contract basis and making that material for them.
He did the right thing, on a company where my acountant worked they got a new manager, he brefiended the oldest manufacturing employee, convinced him of write down every single process that the old guy knew, as soon as the manager tested that everything could be replicated he fired the old guy, bosses nowdays can't be trusted
You’re actually allowed to talk about this material but a friendly fellow in a suit will come to your door and hold out his pinky for you to swear not to reveal this information.
The guy that came to my door made me suck on his pinky.....
That would actually be a cool way for a government to scarily prove they're in control, like, I could arrest you right now, but I won't
a
And by “pinky” I think you’re referring to the caliber of the… tool that he’s holding.
@@JayVal90 which one? 😳
Rookie Mistake. They just could have ask War Thunder to put it in the game and some player would have complained about how inaccurate it is and post the blue print.
It might actually work too.
That idea was scrapped because it would have allowed countries outside of the US to learn of it as well.
fr
I don't know what's dumber... this idea, or the fact that it might even work.
@@andrewyoung4473 which is absolutely terrifying
As a chemist, I immediately spotted the problem when a purer version was made. You don't randomly change the chemical composition of something when you reverse engineer it when you don't know what it does. You try to replicate it 100% first, then start experimenting with changes in variables
Yeah, it it as stupid as making purer Si crystal in attempt to replicate semiconductor. Most likely the whole point of the material was the impurity of one.
That is how they did it in second attempt. Thanks to that, they also improved the management of impurities and found the optimal ratio of them.
Kinda like making hydrogen, distilled water doesn’t work as good as heavy water.
@gacekky1 Because sometimes, it's the impurities that cause functionality.
If you're doing brand new "blue sky" r&d, then yeah, you usually go for most better best purity. But this wasn't blue sky. They had a known target.
Think of this project as a root cause analysis. If you're investigating why a jet engine failed, you don't get a pristine engine that was exactly perfectly in spec, with brand new oils, etc, you get a similar used engine, wirh similar fluids, etc. You are trying to mimic the circumstances of "the event " as closely as possible. And starting with perfection is (usually) not the ideal starting point.
Or, think of this as a modern experimental archeology. The folks in France building a 16th century castle don't just use a hydraulic lift to move large stone blocks. They use a man powered crane, to see jow and ehy things ended up the way they do in other castles.
Hope this helps. 🙂
@@armageddonready4071 Distilled water has a low conductivity, so cant be used for electrolysis. Heavy water is deuterium oxide, so you would get deuterium or heavy hydrogen from its electrolysis. You probably meant an electrolite solution, which has a higher density than pure water when you wrote heavy water.
Making something so classified that we essentially forget how to make it is the most Warhammer 40k thing ever
Ah, praise be the omnissiah
"What is FOGBANK?" "That's classified"
"What does it do?" "Classified"
"Does it contain-" "That's also classified"
"Wait, do you even know what it is anymore?" "That's... classified"
Maybe its an undefined material which only exists to make youtube videos.
@@alanrobertson9790 can't be, that would be classified information
@@Dunkopf The information that tells us if it’s classified is classified
@@ballsackfart **
Answer: *[Classified]*
Why is it classified?
Reason: *[Classified]*
Why the reason is classified?
Reason: *[Authority Insufficient]*
Am I ruining the joke or is this a Haruhi reference?
Okay, so funny story, this is the same reason we can't make any F-1 rocket engines (the big ones on the first stage of the Saturn V) anymore. We have all the technical plans for them, but the state of NASA and engineering in general in the 1960's was such that certain unrecorded adjustments had to be made to the engines to get them to work, and all the people who did it are either dead or have forgotten. F-1s were essentially craftsman-assembled.
which is both okay because
1. we've moved on from F-1 engines because it's 1960's tech and will likely either design a modern engine as big or simply keep using a lot more, smaller engines
2. if we really wanted to use the F-1 again we would do the same reverse-engineering process on what we already know of the design, and making more modern small adjustments to get it to work (at this point an F-2 or perhaps F-1A)
@@flurf5245 yeah no need for an F1 these days, especially for how inefficient they were
Not just the 1960s, even now I bet it takes unrecorded adjustments to get most factories working as planned.
F1 engines could be made today, to better specs lol theres just no reason to when you consider the budget involved. tbh even a dedicated hobbyist could do it if they magically had the resources. CPUs would be a similar example, complex but not impossible with the right resources. its amazing how much we can do in the information era
There is a proposal for a F-1B during the early stages of the SLS development. Which is a modern redesign of the F-1.
Surprised this doesn't happen more often. Oddly enough in many industries like engineering you often find many senior people close to retirement who never pass on key knowledge or processes, thus in retirement are always called in to fix things as consultants on huge wages. Lucractive industry, dare I say human nature.
Yeah but at the same time if you know how to do something the other guys don't you won't be getting paid more to do it
@@straighttothepoint2717 not when you’re an employee but if you get called as a consultant you will. There’s a radiation physicist I work with that had these “secrets of the trade” when he left he was making good money but now they need him as a consultant he’s making $400/h because literally no one else knows and he can name his price.
It wouldn't be a problem if these horrible companies had the foresight to give them pensions.
@@straighttothepoint2717
I do, the other guys just don't know it.
Lets say I'm closer to the end of my career than the start.
And in the 40 odd years I've been at work I've met a lot of peole that keep info to themselves in an attempt to get a consultancy fee when they retire.
Unfortunately I can usually work out what they're not telling me or find my own way of doing something which means they have a nice peaceful retirement
@@jacobfreeman5054 as a result greed has destroyed the medical system once again
I used to work with a nuclear specialist (also a professor) who had worked at Oak Ridge and even pressed the button on some of the underground tests, including one that identified the Fogbank problem (it went bang, but nowhere near enough). Fascinating guy and the lunch time presentation he did on this and decommissioning the pit facility had the audience enthralled.
Whatever button you think is at oak ridge isn’t the button you’re thinking of.
No explosive test was responsible for the identification of the Fogbank problem. It wasn't encountered until over a decade after the US ceased nuclear testing.
The first rule of fogbank is you do not talk about fogbank.
The second rule of fogbank is you do not write down fogbank.
The third rule of fogbank is you forget about fogbank.
i dont think you did this right
The fourth rule is that we need fog bank, so we need you to make it again even if you forgot about it.
The 5th rule is that the Fogbank is an union of fogs
the 6th rule: whats fogbank
The 7th rule?
What is bogf***
Imagine if they found a better version of fogbank by trying to reverse engineer fogbank
The issue was that they can't test any alternatives because of nuclear testing bans so they needed the exact material.
@@MrDoItNice but if they can't test nuclear weapons, what did they want the FOGBANK for? 🤔
And how did they find out they needed the impurities without testing? 🤔🤔🤔
@@MischaKavin to maintain the already existing nuclear weapons
I would hazard a guess that Fogbank was an accidental discovery in the first place, and that they have no idea how or why it works.
I totally understand how this happened. Documentation is that last thing done on a project, if it's ever done at all.
To be fair to them this wasn't really a documentation problem. This was an overuse of classification problem. The knowledge was so heavily classified so it was illegals to properly document it. It was only years later that they noticed it was so classified they accidently didn't keep an unclassified copy of the records. Nobody "forgot" to write the documentation. Everyone just thought someone with a different security clearance had it written down.
Everyone was told not to make documentation for security purposes. And if they asked who had it written down they were probably told that someone else they couldn't know the name of had it covered. Just a circle of everyone thinking someone else was the "trusted one" to write things down. And because it was so classified you can't really speak up and ask around to find out who's job it was to keep the unclassified record.
Me retroactively writing down my lab procedures a week later:
@@hamsterfromabove8905 Kind of like when you have a great new idea, and you decide to encrypt it to protect it from prying eyes, but then forget the password.
They obviously tried to remove one tedious part right away: you can’t RTFM if there’s no FM
@@cara-setun x'D
Reminds me of the WW2 tank gun stabilizer that was considered so great they kept all info about it a secret and barely trained the crews, resulting in crews not knowing how to use it properly and just disabling it instead. Sometimes it's good for the left hand to know what right one is doing.
Same happened for the magnetic detonators on the Mk 14 torpedo. They produced a manual for how to operate the thing, and then locked it away so sailors couldn’t access it due to the classified nature of the tech (tech which was in wide use in most navies and was taken from the Germans originally).
The Bureau of Ordinance also refused to acknowledge the issues in the Mk 14 and claimed that the sailors were using it wrong, while also having their experts get corrected on the torpedo’s use by said sailors. (They also tried to get any sailor who modified the torpedos so that they actually worked court martialed, the naval command was quite unhappy with BuOrd at this point though, so they didn’t)
"The short answer is a series of nuclear oopsie-doopsies..."
Ah, just like my time in engineering school
HOL UP
What engineering school did YOU go to? Is it for mad scientists? 🧑🔬
@@danieldeitrick7947 nah worse: aerospace engineers
@@iliketrains0pwned Any advice for someone trying to get into that field?
@@Attaxalotl Be sure you like maths and not sleeping
With how much of the ulam-teller design is known it's remarkable that it's not public knowledge at this point.
Also the NNSA should have just asked the warthunder forums, they would have found it in no time.
It's likely just a modified aerogel
a
@@hunterwyeth yeah we are
Lmao
step one : make underpowered w-72 (?)
step two : wait for someone to piss off that they paid cash to use a crap weapon
step three : wait for someone even stupider to leak military secrets in hopes that they will fix the missile (who knows where it is by knowing where it isnt it now is).
Reminds me of a story about an inventor probably hundreds of years ago created malleable glass. He showed the King how you could dent it and then pound it back into shape. The King asked if the inventor had told anyone about his creation. He told the King no. The inventor was executed because the glass frightened the King.
I'd love to see in a story somewhere that when the person asks "Have you told anyone else" the inventory/scientist/skeptic immediately says "Yes I have. In fact, I have sent informational packages to various journals and I've told all my friends about this discovery in case something happens"
Or they at least ask "If I say no, will you execute me? Because that's what that question usually leads to."
I made up a sci fi world in my head once as a thought experiment. They were so far into the future that a lot of advanced military tech had all records warped to the end of the universe to be disposed of as soon as it was completed since not knowing was better than everyone knowing your secrets and you not knowing anyone else's. It was a very rough "sketch" but I found it interesting. Just wanted to share. Probably won't matter to anyone
Like how people constantly lie to themselves so much that they start believing it?🥴🥴
@@VitaeLibraa person has people that like him/her. But another person constantly tells him/her that s/he is worthless. This eventually convinces the victim to accept that view and act accordingly towards the people that like him/her.
Get it?😀
@@VitaeLibra warping military records to the end of the universe can't be a good solution to a military problem. But in your sketch since everyone believes it they're doing it. Like how people constantly lie to themselves so much that they start believing it.🙃
Gotta love how impurities makes it better, similar to how roman concrete after years of study finds out that because they weren't as good at mixing, that is what made it self healing.
it's essentially the secret behind one of the signature materials of the modern day world, Steel, and yet we're still IG just sorta not remembering that lesson.
Not necessarily better. More like the original. Which might not be the best design, but as changes in design can't be test, it's better to keep things exactly the same than risk side effects.
I just watched that about Roman concrete last night 🤣🤣🤣
Wait. That was Mark Robers vid, huh?
It might not be better objectively. The with the impurities gone it might be possible to make a more efficient variant. However a different variant would require alterations down the line to the process of creating nuclear weapons. And the US would have to test those new form of nuclear weapons in order to add them to the arsenal. In the current political climate of the world it would be a really bad idea for the US to announce they plan on doing a bunch of new nuclear bomb tests.
So instead of upgrading or improving any part of the process the scientists were ordered to replicate the work that had already been tested. In order to avoid having to do live explosion tests they were ordered to attempt to precisely recreate past work, so they could rely on past tests.
There is every chance that those scientists could have improved the weapons. However they were ordered to recreate exact replicas of the past weapons to avoid upsetting the world order by the US testing new nukes.
@@RAFMnBgaming tell me more about the steel thing
Me coming back to code that I wrote a week ago after not commenting any of it.
"I have no memory of this place."
_Complicates the code even further without commenting any of it_
_Leaves_
@@realname689 "God this is so broken. I had to spend weeks learning how it works just to fix it because there are no docs.
Anyway."
I feel that
I have a theory that hot shot coders should be forced to take a 6 month break and then be forced to maintain their own code. It might encourage clarity of code, comments and, dare I say it, documentation.
* Spends 92 million dollars removing the bugs
* It doesn’t work
* Put the bugs back
* It works
It reminds me of my peculiar habit of secretly storing something so secret to me that i forgot where i had stored it
Heh, it's the main reason we sometimes find treasures and archeological valued items in drywalls, cellars, towers and the like. Used to that, here in France !
You'll be an unknown celeb in a millenium, maybe, with your prized items shown in a museum
Or hide something so well you forgot you even hid it
@@haruyanto8085 like squirrels🐿
fun fact: before I watched this video, I helped my wife with the vacuuming - she needed that nozzle you stick on the end, and couldn't remember what convenient, out-in-the-open, obvious and CANNOT be overlooked place she'd put it.
I pointed out that the black plastic object she wanted was sitting on a black hall table right behind her, virtually invisible where it was, despite being something we constantly walked past.
The old compromise between security and convenience...and we'd managed to hit the sweet spot without knowing it. :D
There were two bellmaker brothers that developed the perfect bell profile for carillons in the beggining of the 17th century and they were so secretive about it, that when they died there was nobody left that knew the formula. It was then rediscovered more than 200 years later.
Imagine accidentally classifying something out of existence.
SCP Foundation agents wish it was this easy :P
*jedi handwave* These are not the UFOs you are looking for.
They did the same thing with titanium machining. When it was near unobtainable, they were using it to make the SR71s. Years later they have to pay stupid money to old machinists to come out of retirement and teach the kids how to cut, weld, and machine it.
@@leftyeh6495Remember those books with the stealth equations the CIA tried to destroy from existence? I forgot to the name of the math book made by a soviet physicist for radio waves.
@@leftyeh6495Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev is the name
Interestingly enough, the fogbank alternatives they created are likely superior to the original fogbank they created. They couldn’t actually test this though, as the US testing nuclear weapons again all of a sudden wouldn’t go unnoticed, so the only solution was to remake the tested, (probably) inferior quality aerogel.
And how exactly do you know which of two nuclear weapons chemicals is better?
If they don't know, without testing, that New Fogbank worked the same as Old Fogbank, how do they know that New Old Fogbank was exactly the same as Old Old Fogbank?
@@themathhatter5290 Spell corrected “like superior” to “likely superior”.
I say that because modern manufacturing processes have the capacity to be much more precise, and we have decades more of experience with aerogels since the original fogbank. We have no way of testing these new materials though, so there’s a chance that although in theory new methods should have higher efficiency and work better, there’s no way to actually know without detonating a fission bomb! Perhaps if there’s a nuclear war we can test some new materials, but I hope not.
@@tomblaise yeah, like its ovbiously superior, we have things like simulations and so much data on chemistry compared to 1980, its ovbious the materials are very advance and better
@@thePronto Its likely chemically and structurally identical. I have no idea how, but apparently they do have tests to see if everything matches up.
One time my brother was in an abandoned military rocket propulsion lab in Wyoming with some pals and they found a note card from probably the 70s that had a bunch of math on it that turned out to be classified rocket engine data for optimization and launch force.
I am SO using this story when explaining my engineers WHY they have to document what the hell they designed.
"*Please Do Not Try It
**Please Do Not Let Him Know"
💀💀💀
"Potential Train Money" absolutely slayed me 🤣🤣🤣
We need more money for the trains!!
It's the US, we know it's probably not going to go the trains anyway 😂
He should have said potential brick money.
@@MUrules2014 I think so. But I also think we should continue developing the roads. A good system has the best roads AND the best trains.
The roads are already really good, but introducing trains should actually make them better. Then, we can further improve the roads based on how the trains helped them.
The trains really work best in cities and connecting cities. However, they tend to get a bit tricky in lower density areas. They work, but the roads really hold up well in these low density conditions. So, I think we should use the trains to supplement the existing system, not to compete with or replace it.
Using toll roads, we limit the number of cars entering cities. This should help limit the cars in the city to just the ones that are supposed to be there. Anybody driving to work or from one point to another in the city is supposed to be there. Somebody just passing through the city should take another route. So, to accommodate that, we shall upgrade existing highways that bypass cities to proper freeway standards and build new ones as necessary.
The freeways shall be modified to allow overhead railroads to be built over them. The roads are already clear strips of land that connect cities, so they sound like perfect places to put railroads. High-speed passenger trains will be run on these new rails, and the existing railroad network will be just for freight. In each city we can run light rail over the urban freeways, and these intercity trains over the primary arteries. Because freeways and railroads will follow each other, rail interchanges can be placed at highway interchanges, allowing intercity travelers to switch to light rail in the city. The light rail will run over the urban freeways and have stops at each exit or wherever is practical. From there, street cars could be used on large streets within the cities.
Ultimately, the way to make roads more efficient is to minimize traffic. Traffic is chaos. Large trucks are necessary for the last leg of the delivery process, but they tend to be problematic in traffic. Truck routes help ease this problem, but cars can usually still go on the truck routes. Trucks just have to take them. I think we should build truck-only highways within cities. The trucks will be separated from the regular cars, hopefully making it easier for travelers. The trucks, in addition, will not have to deal with the chaos of cars coming into or leaving the city as much as before.
From a more practical standpoint, I think stacked highways are probably going to be useful. Essentially, we run a bridge deck over an existing freeway, allowing us to expand the road quickly and without needing more land. We take out the median on the bottom and run either direction on just one level. Each level would effectively add however many lanes are on the ground.
Especially with the implication that the cash would somehow be more effectively spent on trains. Not bloody likely, considering almost all of the history of light rail in the U.S.
It's basically styrofoam. When the conventional warhead explodes it releases massive amount of x-rays and gamma radiation, that turn the intermediate into plasma. This plasma is an intetegral part of fusion and fission of the secondary device.
Knock knock
@@osdever Who's there..?
*oh shiet!*
No. Fogbank is not Styrofoam.
At least one H bomb from the 50s used polyurethane foam as the interstage material. I've seen no evidence of Styrofoam ever being used. Fogbank is likely rather different. There's indication that beryllium oxide is used in the interstage of the W76 (which uses fogbank). Whether that means fogbank is some form of BeO such as beryllia aerogel, or whether BeO and fogbank are two different materials used in the W76 interstage is hard to tell. There's also come confusion as to whether interstage material and channel filler are synonymous terms.
SeaBreeze, the predecessor to Fogbank, which was used in the B61 was chemically related to Diallyl phthalate.
Interesting thread. Conceptually, it is just a filler like styrofoam, but the exact formula made it a particularly 'clean' bomb. The bomb would fission successfully with tonnes of different fillers, but they knew there is a danger of a lot more 'dirt' with an untested filler.
Is it some sort of advanced moderator, like tritium was the the performance of 'the shrimp'?
As someone who’s a mechanical engineer and In charge of documenting manufacturing process and following certain specifications its amazing how much shit isn’t documented. Looking for work instructions, travelers, interchangeable parts lists, rev changes, or even design history has always been a nightmare. This is partly because no one does their fucking job, people do their job wrong, or someone who isn’t trained/qualified to do their job is in charge and doesn’t do their fucking job. This results in things being recorded wrong, saved in the wrong area, accidentally deleted, or just assumed that the next person will figure it out. Combine this with bad management, no money to do the job right which means it’s rushed, and other manufacturers your working also having the same problem. Suddenly you have 20 people all looking for now somethin was made 8 years ago and no one remembers. Then you spend so much time trying to figure it out you get chewed out at your superiors for not figuring it because they already did it how hard could it be. All the while no one else was able to figure it out either so their just placing blame on the workers lower down for not doing their job when they didn’t have the right people doing it in the first place 8 years ago.
Agreed, often have the experience of pleading with an engineer to add information to their drawings only to achieve a puzzled look on their face. Like showing a card trick to a dog, they just don't get it.
When you first mentioned that they managed to replicate it without the impurity and it still didn't work, I thought to myself "haha imagine if the purity was the problem". 25 seconds and 69 million dollars later it turns out that was exactly the problem. How did they not think of it lol
Well we could only guess because he specifically emphasised it, that purity difference probably wouldn’t have seemed important at the time
@@circuit10 yeah it's more likely that nobody thought about it.. they knew they needed to clean the chemical or whatever, so they did. they just did it using new tools that weren't available before and did it a little too well lol
Who wants an "imperfect" anything? Our detergents are "new and improved" not "old and imperfect".
@@vastowen4562 Still though, when dealing with such extreme forces you would expect any engineer to consider that changing anything, even the impurities, could have a drastic effect down the road. This is basic shit that people take into account when doing something as simple as mixing concrete.
The chemical impurity likely does not effect the physical quality of FOGBANK, but the radiation interactions of it.
Reminds me of Greek Fire, the medieval napalm. The Byzantines used it to devastate their enemies but kept it so secret we don’t know how they made it anymore.
We know how to, we just don't need to make it as it's no longer useful to us today.
Or like the imperium of man, in general.
@@sion8 Napalm.
@@brodriguez11000
Not exactly the same thing.
It is factually incorrect to say we know how Greek fire was made.
They took 11 years and several people in the project passing away to forget how to make it.
It takes me 11 days to forget what my programm-code does, which I considered so obvious what it does, that I decided not to comment it.
Do you now tell people to comment their code?
If this wasn’t true it would be hilarious. My nephew is a “Corporate Saviour”, he goes into failing businesses to try to save them and restructure them to “save” what could be saved. Time after time he has found that critical “corporate knowledge” has been “lost” usually by firing “surplus old employees”. In some instances he has had to hire back old employees, usually at much higher pay. Sometimes he couldn’t find the old employee or rediscover the knowledge. In some instances he found the old employees had been fired, gone out to work for competitors or started their own businesses and thrived. He still does the same job, now days one of his first steps is to find all employees who have been “let go” in the last 2 years and do a proper exit interview, he says it gives him a comprehensive overview of the business much faster.
I don't document every secret at work, some things are word-of-mouth, backed up by telling a lot of people. This way if someone steals the documentation they still won't be able to make our stuff.
Except the more people you tell, the less secret it is. Someone once said that the maximum number of people who can keep a secret is 3, if 2 of them are dead,
@@dougerrohmer true, but a Chinese or Russian hacker would have a way harder time getting such specific information from someone's head in addition to having to get the majority of the information from a mostly offline server.
@@madcow3417 "mostly offline" So, not properly airgapped.
@@mpf1947 this companys info sec is clearly awful lmao
The biggest secret, poorly kept is that "it's just ketchup, mustard and mayo mixed together".
As a Chinese government spy this really tickles my fancy! I knew I’d learn something from this channel! Thanks Sam from HAI!
😂
Given the Chinese knack for revesese enegineering literally anything they probs could've done it for $900k instead of $90m
@@d.b.cooper1 We have leverse engineered fogbank. We sell to you , speciul plice. Onry $1,000,000 per pound, not $50,000,000 rike you spend. Oh and we have dis killer virus from Wuhan, all new, not rike dat rast batch.
Haha! Blueberry hawk lao-tzu alliance! Please advise. Isn’t saying random words fun?
🙄
This info has been in the public domain and unclassified for 20 years at this point…
Hey, cool seeing a shoutout about Oak Ridge! I worked at the national lab last summer and visited the graphite reactor. One of my friends worked at Y-12 and it was insane the amount of security checks he had to go through before being approved to work there. Apparently, he's had a background check so thorough and his security clearance is now so high that he can work at pretty much any other place in the country. (though that's just what he told me, so maybe he was exaggerating 🤷♂️)
I was a nuke for long awhile....(you have no idea how deep they look at you)... Just tell the truth...about EVERYTHING they ask about, even the embarrassing stupid shit you did while drunk as a pirate lord...because if you lie ,trust me ,they will find out ,and you will not be cleared.
No He is right once you have a clearance. They will have you go to other projects to help out .
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_clearance
The stuff also has one or two materials that could be worth creating a superfund hazmat site if not handled properly in large quantities. Rumors one part of the process is something where they use a fluorine compound, and if you know how reactive or toxic that can be in some cases - it's normally not worth messing around with. (In a way some scientists were wanting to forget about it? Hoping it was a one-and-done thing due to the mess involved in making it, not considering that some aerogels will turn brittle/crumbly over time.)
The semiconductor industry.
As someone who had issues with extremely quick forgetting (For example: when I am about to make a Google search or when I forget a crucial thing I studied in a school textbook) This tale of the NNSA makes me feel a little better about myself
You’re not forgetful, it’s just that your memories are so important that they’re classified above your clearance level!
@Jakob Roggy I wonder why they would be doing that
@@RTOF
*THE MENTAL NSA WANTS TO KNOW YOUR LOCATION!*
I once used to forget where I put my phone a few minutes later, so I just memorised the locations I used most of the time
@Rnet
You sound young? as you get older it does get much worse,
I now have to mimic the movement of a tool (eg scissors are index and middle finger doing a scissor action and a hammer is a fist doing a hammering action) at work when I go to get tools out of my toolbox. Because if I don't I've forgotton which tool I wanted once I get there especially if somene stops on the way me to ask something..
Contender for "Most stock images squeezed in a 6 min video" world record.
you must be new here
I rarely watch HAI because of that. They’re quite annoying.
I usually scroll down and browse the comments while I'm listening. Like now.
there is a similar case regarding the imperfection mentioned here. The holes in the swiss cheese stopped occurring and they were unsure why. But later found out it was due to there no longer being any particles in the milk. The particles were from sawdust and other stuff occurring in farms, and these particles would add the holes in the cheese. Thus to create the holes again they added sawdust themselves during the cheese making process.
If my grandma had only written down the brownie recipe i wouldn't have exploded like nine ovens and a blender.
The people who worked there were probably super proud of not taking records and notes after the fact because that's exactly what they were told to do 😂
I feel like some of the "forgetting" was probably intentional. The people who worked on this project lived through the cold war, knew what it was like to be afraid of a nuclear bomb dropping on your head at any moment. Then, years later, once life was finally peaceful some government operative shows up at their doors asking "Hey could you tell us how to make a compound for this weapon of mass murder?" I'd probably "forget" as well.
I doubt it. Possible though.
The answer would be
"im sorry that's classified"
And when they say they have the top level clearance the answer would be
"with respect you are not on the list of people who I can divulge that information to, and the only person with the authority to add you to that list is dead"
The people who worked on this project probably understand that having their nukes working properly is kind of important. Forgetting isn't going to make nukes go away, it's just going to make the government waste more money trying to fix or replace them.
Your reason makes almost no sense brother
In many industries skilled employees close to retirement often never pass things/procesess on cause it's common to be called in when retired as consultants paid large fees to 'fix' things when they inevitably break/have issues. Common in engineering, oldest trick in the book. Comes down to management in the end to forsee such things, which I imagine was the case here was overlooked due to time constraints/pressures & confidential nature.
Hey, look at it this way. There's no higher top secret rating, than the info literally not even existing. Top notch security 👌
Here's another --- we manufactured armored vehicles. The drive wheel of a tank is called a sprocket (roughly the size of a washing machine and solid steel). They are wildly tough since they have to propel and brake very heavy tracked vehicles. One year-end our supplier replaced their heat treat bath. Picture a small swimming pool. And it had been in service since the start of the Cold War. The sandy-salty material had been contaminated with countless layers of ambient dirt, dust, cigarettes, half-eaten lunches, paint, piss, hydraulic oil, birds that got too close, spit, etc. Picture chemical witches' brew. Especially since the production parts often had various chemicals on them before they were dropped in. To upgrade the process they removed it and replaced it with industry standard material. Guess what? They sent us a run of parts. Snap-crackle-pop is not what you want to hear the first time you start moving a tank. Took weeks of engineering trial and error to tweak the heat-treat bath. After three weeks of no useful production they removed the new materials and dumped the haz-mat containers of witches' brew back in. Worked like a charm.
Factory: "this water is dirty and stinks, best to clean it"
Buyer: "why am I hearing small explosions?"
Factory: "uhhh.... idk... _jerry piss in the pool, don't ask why-_ yeah we'll deal with it sorry."
So what I got out of this is that you can make a mini thermonuclear bomb at my high school lab. Upon further research I have found that I was not the first person to get this idea and there is a guide online on how to make civilian grade nuclear bombs.
Welp, you're on a list now.
@@hk74654 welp im also on a list now
Ah yes, the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Low grade nuclear bombs are not hard to make -- you just need to obtain around 115lb of purified uranium 235 and rapidly assemble it into a single mass in your lab, which is now a radioactive crater.
Obtaining and purifying the materials is the limiting factor -- separating u-235 from u-237 at the required scale is basically impossible to accomplish undetected. Thermonuclear and implosion fission bombs are too complicated for the high school lab.
@@hk74654 but I used a VPN!!!
2:47 thanks for the tutorial, really needed it ❤❤
They didn't forget everything, but they used research that wasn't sited, so they just thought they would do what they did before. When they tried to make it again, they had a general idea, but not the specifics. They also didn't know the basic research that was the foundation. When they figured it out again, they changed the formula a little. The impurities that made Fogbank work, also made the material break down over time. They altered it just enought that the new Fogbank would last longer, they hope. You never really know for sure.
That diagram means they do have detailed records now.
The components- e.g. “Process V”- are almost certainly defined in detail within a series of additional classified documents, each with its own access control. That’s why you have a chain of steps with names like that. This lets anybody see the overview diagram you showed, but only a top official like the NNSA head has clearance to see the info for all of the components. The issue now would be idiocy like not having any person with SCI access to all the pieces or losing track of some if those documents, because the only thing more incompetent than the US government you see is some of the parts you don’t.
Like modern software development. Some guy has the "grand picture", and hundreds of programmers work on separate pieces of code. Everyone uses work products from someone else but doesn't know how these were made or what they actually do. And most contributors are not even part of the project and are probably unaware of what their work is being used for.
At least there's often documentation nowadays, even if it's all over the place.
Ah, yes. "Documentations is like sex. If it's good, it's very very good. If it's bad, it's still better than none."
But back to the military, because they have additional "special issues". Even with a pretty high security clearance, it's still all on "need to know" basis. If you work on "process W", you don't need to now about "process V" and "process X". As the manager, you just know that the processes exist, not any details. There is no single person who could leak the complete process. Documentation may be stored in different facilities, where no one knows what the documents are about.
Some day, a few decades later, someone might open a safe to find documentation for "process W". One of possibly hundreds of different processes with the generic cover name "process W" (like "K-Stoff"). The documents are marked to belong to a department which no longer exists. Usually, the safe gets closed again and no one the wiser.
Arguably, this works very well to keep information from falling into enemy hands. It also is very effective against your own people. But, in typical military paranoia, everyone's the enemy anyway.
"So what exactly is fogbank?"
NSA: "No"
Reminds me of how the Kriegmarine's battleships were equipped with 11' guns, which were weaker than their older predecessors in the Kaiserliche Marine which had 15' guns because the knowhow of how to manufacture the guns were lost in the interwar years
A very interesting tidbit. Could you point me at some reading. I was always very interested in WW2 german military
@@axelkolle9994 I have mainly read books about the Eastern front because that is what interests me most, and my knowledge of German operations in the West, Scandinavia, North Africa and the Kriegsmarine is very limited. If anyone else has books to recommend, feel free to do so aswell! Here are some good books:
"The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze
"Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945" by Evan Mawdsley
"When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler" by David Glantz
"Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East" by Stephen Fritz
“Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945” by Catherine Merridale
As soon as you mentioned that the material was "even purer than the vintage stuff", my first thought was literally "That's probably the issue here." How long did it take the engineers from finding out about the purity differences and coming to the conclusion of needing impurities?
I really di chuckle at 5:20 when he reveals that his motivation for trimming spending waste was "Do it for trains." Someone please build this autistic man more railways!
The teachers who told those engineers to "show your work" are probably laughing now.
Or dead.
Probably dead actually.
We are surrounded by examples of this. In a societal collapse, much knowledge is lost. Who knows which of our current technologies will be thought of as mythical in the future we are sliding into?
Strange handheld rectangular slabs resistant to disassembly with a picture of an apple stamped into the back.
None
@@arandomcommenter412 That was a great example of the decline in IQs that are causing progress to stall in every area except computers.
@@joemerino3243 Or maybe it is because we have hit a barrier of complexity that can be hardly conceived of by the human brain. Quantum Mechanics is very very counterintuitive and super hard to grasp so we acutally need the progress in computing power to solve those equations in a timely manner. But what do I know I am just a Biochemistry student.
@@Mulmgott As a biochemistry student you should be well-placed to see the tragic collapse of the sciences. Look how long ago we bioengineered the production of insulin. Look how much promise bioengineering has, how relatively simple it is compared to quantum mechanics or modern chip design, and how dreadfully little has been done since the development of restriction enzymes, site directed mutagenesis, gene silencing, and even crispr. We have every tool needed to do virtually anything we want, from decimating cancer by introducing supernumerary copies of p53 to making trees grow bacon by introducing fatty acid synthesis enzymes into moringa trees. And yet it takes us 10 years to approve salmon that grow slightly faster, and in the meantime we are wasting time with GFP cats and other nonsense.
Fogbank is the interstage neutron delay material. It does two things, it converts the hard gamma energy to soft x rays the bomb can use, but at the same time it absorbs neutrons until it saturates and allows the neutrons to then start the reaction in the secondary fission plug. Not gonna say whats in it but if you wonder what it looks like, it is a porus rigid foam very similar to hard antistatic foam material. 🤓😎
One thing I’ve always wondered is how it wouldn’t be destroyed by the detonation of the fission primary before it could serve its purpose.
There's no evidence fogbank is a neutron shield.
The primary already emits most of it energy as x-rays, not gammas. Their energy is decreased by expansion of the photon gas.
@@rfichokeofdestinyBy the detonation of the primary or the HE of the primary? There's standoff gaps to protect structures from the HE.
The Fogbank is "destroyed" (vapourised) by the fission explosion of the primary. That's what it's meant to do.
@@Evan_Bell Yes, the HE. I know they fire inwards but I assumed there would also be some collateral damage in the general vicinity. So if there’s a gap, I’m guessing it would have to be sized based on the time it takes the HE to compress the fission core and start the reaction vs. the time it takes for the shockwave from the HE to expand outward.
@@rfichokeofdestiny Precisely.
I really like inventing and making stuff in my free time, this video has inspired me to keep documentation of the changes I make between my sketches/drawings and the actual final thing I make. Since one day my memory isn’t going to be so good
We should definitely let sam know how making fogbank works
Spoiler: it was Sam's sense of comedy
Damn shit on
I was told that In order to make the aerogel you need a very large centrifuge that can be sealed with an internal vacuum, and a way to inject the “gel” and hydrogen gas, at a specific temperature… kind of like a cotton candy machine on steroids, lol
Thank you! I had heard of the Fission/Fusion Bomb, but never heard anything more about it or what made it unique, now I know.
Strong Mechanicus Vibes. Don’t lose track of those STCs!
If only they had listened to SpongeBob to "WRITE THAT DOWN!" they wouldn't have forgotten.
DON'T WRITE THAT DOWN!
"Potential train money" jab was *chef's kiss*
Reminds me of Greek fire. The stuffs like nabalm but can burn underwater, was a secret technology that was long forgotten. Yet we knew about since we have records of it. The difference there was actually material left to work with involving Fogbank.
What a wonderful video about bricks!
Don't worry, Sam, I'm helping to cover for you
Bricks, and covid, apparently...
@@mariusvanc apparently
not to be confused with Spankbank, something most of us will never forget
As my Grandfather was at Y12 then, you didn't mention some DIED to purposeful exposure to Beryllium without PPE.
Can you imagine being the guy who figured out why the cleaner Fogbank wasn't working? Think how frustrating it would be to figure out THAT was the problem.
Imagine if humans forgot how semiconductors were made and the only thing they remembered that a highly pure silicon was somehow involved. The only way to breakthrough would be to mess up
We appreciate your effort and hard work on this channel. God bless you.
I am now replacing the phrase "Tax Dollars" with "Potential Train Money" forever more
One day, when they forget how to make it again, they'll use this video as a primary source on how to do it.
This is some straight up Warhammer 40k type shenanigans. On the bright side, if we didn't know how to make this seemingly crucial component, our adversaries probably don't either. Maybe.
3:22 "even tho NASA invested 23 mil into FOGBANK alternative, nobody could conclude such thing could work" FOGBANK clearly caused foggy memory
NNSA* distinctly not NASA
NNSA*
This is some 40k dark age of humanity logic right there.
Reminds me of how in the movie RED, Karl Urban's character goes into the CIA's top secret archives to look for info on Bruce Willis' character.... but they only have redacted versions of his files.
Funny how it's the same reason why modern swiss cheese has less holes in it, since modern cleaning processes reduce the amount of dust (ideally wheat dust) in the environment. Nowadays they add the dust in after cleaning to get the desired hole quantity
I took an Intro to Business Law class in college that I could summarize in one sentence: "If it's not in writing it doesn't count". This video is proof that the application of that sentence goes way beyond business law.
You [REDACTED] the [REDACTED] at [REDACTED].
Welcome for the SPC - Special Procurement Censorship.
Once distinct, the memory has been fogged, making it challenging to recall that particular detail.
This coming out at the same time as Veritasium's video about concrete (which we lost the recipe to for over 1,000 years) is crazy
Now it’s time for “spot the intentional mistake we can put into our yearly mistakes video”: At 0:54, “Tennessee” is misspelled “Tennesse”.
Love how the screen at 4'28" is in Russian.. made we look in their archives... maybe they still have our plans laying around somewhere :-)
Was about to point that out lol
I tried baking some brownies like that. Now my oven glows green, and some nice men in suits from the NRC are drinking coffee in the den and asking questions.
0:48 Nice of you to include that disclaimer.
That way, somebody like me does not yell at you about how the HGM-25A Titan I carried a W-38 3.75 megaton warhead, not the W-76 100 kiloton warhead.
LGM
I couldn’t reverse engineer fogbank at home, but I did make some bomb-ass brownies.
I just read a 3 year old article on this 2 days ago. I've never heard of it before that. Neat.
When I worked for Dow Chemical they stated about a sixth of their development efforts was to recreate things that they had previously known, but had been lost by employee turnover and poor documentation. My guess is that they may have addressed this problem by increasing their development efforts by documenting many things that ultimately they didn't need and downsizing their workforce to lose even more information, selling off business so some part of the retained knowledge was irrelevant, and merging with Union Carbide so that they had a whole new set of processes where they still needed to redo development to recreate things that had previously been known. But that is just guessing.
"It worked" except we can't test nukes so we don't know if it works or not
The loss of the process has nothing to do with weapons developers not being detail oriented. It has everything to do with clueless administrators being unwilling to preserve important records as required by law. They did this in order to save a small amount of funding and get an award. Since the information is highly classified, it was most likely maintained at the facility, and possibly a second site. When the gov plays musical chairs with facilities closures, it costs money to preserve records. Since they are closing facilities to "save" money, no money shows up to preserve highly classified technical records. The reasoning is production is complete, no justification for records retention (the records are not needed anymore), so destroy. Don't ask me how I know. Remember when Nancy Pelosi destroyed a Presidential Records Act document on live TV? that kinda stuff.
Don't ask you how you know? Well there's another record lost.
Now we know what was in Joe's garage. It was the recipe for fogbank.
It was never potential train money, the DoD reliably fails to account for all their budget.
Swiss cheese was actually losing its holes because the milk was too clean, and didn't have any impurities on which bubbles could form. Cheese-makers ended up having to manually add a tiny bit of hay dust to bring back the holes.
So, the secret to making FOGBANK is putting a tortilla in the oven at 200°C for 10 minutes.
I even got to show it to the fire department!
You missed one of the "e"s at the end of Tennessee (totally not a blatant ploy to be in the next mistakes special).
I knew it! They forgot the secret ingredient, MSG
MSG really does make everything taste better.
I thought everyone had forgotten about the Michael Schenker Group.
Oh hey this kinda sorta happened in June with Stinger Missiles. Raytheon's called up pensioners in order to figure out and teach how to build Stinger missiles, otherwise they'd have to completely redesign them.
It was a material needed not only for structural strength around the Secondary, but it's main function was to be as transparent to X-radiation and neutron flux as possible, whilst also providing plasma pressure.
It's unlikely that fogbank also serves as a neutron shield.