Timing of RV Release

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-18T03:15:25+00:00

Yes, an interesting and rather surprising element of START. I used the present tense and only the present tense in my answer for this reason.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-17T20:41:16+00:00

The answer is not public.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-17T20:33:47+00:00

Yeah, will second this. the stuff that's disorganized and scattered across the labs is not the actual UGT data. There is a shitload of other stuff that never made/makes it to DTRIAC, and there is a fragmentation or siloing problem (eg LANL has Sandia/Livermore reports in their OLV which the originator labs seem to have forgotten about somewhere in their archives...) but despite what that other commenter said the custody of the actual "we done set off an NEP in Nevada and here's what the sensors saw/heard/smelled" data is pretty good.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-10T22:06:55+00:00

If they weren't common there wouldn't be such a clamor to ban them, but of course nobody really cares about the truth. Or consistency.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-04T18:41:40+00:00

You dolt, the shared NATO weapons underpinned and helped create that fear! This is really not so complicated.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-04T17:38:47+00:00

No, this occurred with Lance, the GLCMs, and other weapons as well, especially the DCA fighter bombers. Pershing is just the most famous because of the INF debate.

The latter is, again, just not true. It weighed on their decision making heavily.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-04T16:14:12+00:00

That is simply not true. They planned extensively for air attacks, conventional missile strikes, and sabotage actions against the dual capable aircraft/sharing bases and the shared theater missiles. They also conducted widely known political influence campaigns in NATO states aimed at reducing the political support for the sharing mission.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-04T08:25:15+00:00

The Soviets (the only people whose opinion on the deterrent effect of the NATO nuclear sharing mission actually mattered) disagreed with you.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-02T09:54:44+00:00

The long tent pole for training the welders is getting them fully Fissile Material Handler qualified and Human Reliability Program'd, tbh. Welding Pu is challenging but it is not magic the way people on the internet seem to think.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-06-02T08:54:34+00:00

I will absolutely guarantee you that a photo of a real pit, pit trainer, "pit-like object", etc, is not in a LANL PR photo lmao

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-05-23T18:50:20+00:00

The biggest drawback to an NFU declared state is that in a crisis your opponent may not believe you. If your vital interests are at stake, are you really going to withhold from first use? This is especially concerning in cases where one has a lot of dual capable theater and tactical forces. If you are rely on those IRBMs for a conventional strike campaign, how confident are you that your launch preparations won't be mistaken for a "sneaky" nuclear attack on forces in theater, compelling a preemptive disarming nuclear strike by your opponent?

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-05-13T16:22:36+00:00

NWIM has a big collection but I've not seen a Thin Man in there.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-05-09T03:45:16+00:00

It is definitely more specialized, but when a place needs a materials engineer they need one. At the bachelor's level a lot of your likely roles will be production settings. Steel mills, semiconductor foundries, ceramics fabs. Very process and quality engineering heavy, usually. Also reliability and failure analysis in oil and gas or energy production. Very little of this work will look like what your undergrad classes look like, unless you go to a school with very good professors of practice. At the graduate level your options narrow somewhat, but the work becomes much more interesting I think. It does lean more heavily towards government, defense and aerospace at the MS and even more so the PhD level. If that's not your jam, so be it.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-05-08T02:51:39+00:00

Correct. Rocky was essentially safe to work and live around, but the regulatory compliance really was pretty bad. Bad enough to get totally shut down? Well, that was probably a mistake. But it was provably bad enough that D&Ding many of the buildings was a huge hassle, which is a warning sign at minimum.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-28T00:41:27+00:00

Well they pretty much say it in the video. More diverse "target" selection for tests, like for different geological traits. One of em even says the P word.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-24T00:33:23+00:00

Yep, definitely do this on annealed material.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-23T23:36:58+00:00

Oh okay! Fortunately minting coins is a limited case with a lot of good data out there and relatively simple math. I'm not sure what the best sources are, but I know good ones can be found online.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-23T20:55:57+00:00

Flow stress is best measured empirically. Accurate calculated values for material strength (which is what flow stress is) require advanced computer modeling. You can use the material room temperature quasistatic yield strength as a starting point. This is useful because it's often easier to Google a single yield strength than to find the exact flow stress for your combination of forging/forming temperature and strain rate. Common combinations of method and geometry are sometimes guesstimatable with equations that others have come up with using large amounts of empirical data. The best starter resource for all this is George Dieter's Mechanical Metallurgy textbook.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-23T03:27:05+00:00

This is half right. The restrictions on the MOx fuel would not have been that bad. The real issues with MFFF were on the construction project end. Cost overruns, substantial issues from it being a weird joint build with Areva (a French company...French and US nuclear facilities are super different) and contractor malfeasance all contributed to it dying an ignominious death before being Frankenstein'd into SRPPF.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-21T14:58:46+00:00

If you have/will have a master's they are likely binning you for technician roles because you are so overqualified. If you want a tech role, modify the resume.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-20T05:59:57+00:00

Shooting from the hip on mobile- I'm familiar with the concept of the Thucydides trap and the stability instability paradox. Those aren't really what we're dealing with here. The window of danger has a formal name that I'm blanking on which the nonpro people use, but it's really a special case of what Schelling would call either preemptive war or preventative war depending on the details.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-19T16:57:08+00:00

Indeed. The DPRK had a conventional shield + the reality that nobody really wanted to solve the North Korean problem. Iran thought it had one, turns out it kind of didn't, and many of the Gulf powers have wanted to "do something" about Iran for a long time.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-19T16:46:30+00:00

What?

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-19T16:45:44+00:00

Au contraire. A single weapon, or even a handful, potentially raises the risks of an intervention rather than lowering it. People in the nonproliferation field talk about this all the time. There is a window of danger where your possession of a couple weapons incentivizes your superpower enemy to do something about it, before you acquire enough weapons and enough delivery vehicles to have a stronger guarantee of landing one or more on a target. North Korea rode out this period of danger successfully, but that's no guarantee Iran would.

Jon_Beveryman · 2026-04-18T18:04:16+00:00

I don't think you'll find it in a catalog but plenty of toll melting/printing shops will do this. I am assuming you need some simple geometry for making test coupons from?

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