….. A friend told me that …

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is one of the smallest federal agencies in America with less than 3000 total employees.

Compare this to the Riverside USD in Riverside CA where my friend lives : 5000 employees.

Riverside USD is a typical urban American school district.

Recently trump & Musk’s DOGE sought to fire many of those working for NNSA only to realize that wouldn’t be a smart move

then couldn’t find those they fired to let them know they were rehired.

The NNSA is tasked with a number of high security and technical duties among which are the overall security of America’s

nuclear arsenal.

They are also responsible for maintaining the fitness of the weapons.

Nuclear weapons are by definition radioactive.

All of America’s nuclear warheads rely upon plutonium metal to initiate the detonation.

Plutonium is not found in nature, rather it is produced in nuclear reactors.

 

Being radioactive it degrades over time.

One of the problems with this degradation process is that it produces helium gas, which shows up as small bubbles in the

plutonium metal.

It turns out that the tolerances for performance are such that it doesn’t take much helium gas bubbles within the plutonium

metal to make the system unstable.

From time to time highly trained individuals in the NNSA disassemble our warheads, remove the plutonium “pit” and

through a process of carful machining remove the helium bubbles.

Because plutonium is highly radioactive this process must take place in a secure radiation protected facility.

There are only 3 such facilities in the continental US and the warheads must be safely transported to these facilities, again

under the control of the NNSA.

US nuclear warheads have a “selective” yield, meaning the explosive power can be adjusted depending on the target.

The average yield of US weapons is around 190KT or about 15 to 20 times the power of the bombs that destroyed

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One detonated over Indianapolis would destroy that city..

The US has about 1000 deployed weapons with the ability to deploy more if needed.

The NNSA would be tasked with making more weapons ready.

You would probably agree with me that throughout human history there has not been a human built machine that did not

suffer a catastrophic failure.

(The Space Shuttle suffered two such catastrophic failures).

The most complex machines ever devised by humans are nuclear weapons and the systems to deliver them.

It is not a matter of if but when one of these systems suffers a catastrophe and an accidental detonation occurs.

I, for one, prefer that America continues to employ these relatively few but highly trained individuals. Musk and trump, with

their careless stunts are making such an accidental detonation more likely.

You may laugh this off but this is serious stuff requiring serious people.

Musk and trump are not serious people.

 

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