Talk:W56

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Is this the warhead Samuel T. Cohen discusses in his Autobiography?

"In the way of predictions of things to come, that I’d never see Los Alamos again after the Albuquerque fiasco turned out to be dead wrong. Several years later, when I still was working with Bennie, he called me into his office one day. He had a problem. The Minuteman ICBM was in its final stages of development and, sitting atop the program, he had to make a decision on what kind of thermonuclear warhead to put into it. By “what kind”, I’m referring to the choice he had to make as to whether to put in a warhead being developed by Los Alamos or by the Livermore lab, that had matured considerably by then and was in hot competition with Los Alamos. He wanted me to go to both labs, size up their proposals, and report back to him with a recommendation. He was aware that I was still banned from Los Alamos and on the best of possible terms with Livermore, but thought I was capable of reaching an objective conclusion on the matter. I reluctantly accepted Bennie’s request; Los Alamos reluctantly accepted my visit despite Bradbury’s feelings toward me (he had no choice since this time it was Bennie who was sitting in the catbird seat); and Livermore was delighted no end to be able to push their product to their pal Sam. Off I went to the labs. At Livermore I was personally hosted by the director, Harold Brown, who later on became Jimmy Carter’s Defense Secretary. At Los Alamos, Bradbury refused to see me and put me in the hands of his deputy, an old friend of mine from wartime days. I listened as best I could to both sides (which wasn’t easy for me), took copious notes (far less easy), went back home and mulled over the matter. Pretty exhaustively, I might say, for my emotions were, to put it mildly, pretty torn. Finally, I came down on the side of the Los Alamos proposal, for reasons I won’t bother to explain here. I went to seeThe Commies Are Coming 83 Bennie and told him of my preference and why. He thanked me but gave no indication of what his decision might be. If you’re holding your breath waiting to find out which lab got the warhead you can start breathing again. Los Alamos. If you think, in telling you this tale, I’m trying to gain some credit for the decision, forget it. It’s possible I may have influenced Bennie with my analysis of the problem. However, as for the decision itself, I’ll requote the Joint Chiefs colonel: “Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Except in this case it wasn’t. Having gotten the bid, Los Alamos now set about to test the warhead. It was a miserable failure, going off, as I recall, at like about half the predicted yield. Which sure said a lot about my technical judgment. In the meantime, Livermore, having put in so much time and effort on the warhead, was determined to test it. It went off at about twice the predicted bang. There were a lot of red faces around, including mine. However the decision had been made and Los Alamos was now put to work, with help from Livermore, which really had to be humiliating, to bring the bang up to the promised level. They finally did, after a couple more tests."

Interesting story, do you believe he was appraising the LLNL W62 & LLNL & Sandia's W56? As it is curious why the W62 was fielded when they had the W56, however both are LLNL designs, not LANL vs LLNL.
http://www.nnsa.energy.gov/mediaroom/pressreleases/nnsa-dismantles-entire-stock-w56-nuclear-weapons
http://energy.gov/articles/dismantling-history-final-w62-warhead
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Almanac/USWarheads.shtml
I haven't been able to find a minuteman I warhead designed by LANL(los Alamos), the first one seems to be the W78 in the 70s. Which did indeed have an initially "disappointing" yield:
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/W78.html
All the previous warheads seem to be LLNL's, the two previously mentioned W56, W62 & the W67.
However using the movie that he went to see as a benchmark, the "Commies are coming"(a re-release in 1984 of Red Nightmare(1962) it then excludes all the prior mentioned warhead from being the likely warheads he was discussing and instead what was more probably being appraised was LLNLs W87 for the MX missile(1986) & LANLs W88(1990s). http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/commies_are_coming_commies_are_coming/"
However if instead this story of his is set in the Red Nightmare of 1962 timeframe, then that would put it definitively back in the era of the W62 & W67, and I can find no firm info on a LANL designed Minuteman warhead of that era.
178.167.208.192 (talk) 13:07, 16 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This is the talk page for the article W56. As with all wikipedia article talk pages, it is for discussions related to possible changes to the article, not for discussion of the subject of the article.
You may want to take this question to Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science. Thanks! loupgarous (talk) 04:29, 21 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Request for Comments: Differing Perspectives on W56 Mishap at Pantex Plant[edit]

Editors suggested that the RfC be restarted with a neutral and brief summary per Wikipedia:Requests for comment#Statement should be neutral and brief. Cunard (talk) 01:12, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


At least one undisputed and one potential concern with source reliability exist in our article W56 in the last sentence: "One warhead, owing to its use of high performance but high sensitivity PBX nearly experienced a high-explosive detonation with no nuclear yield in 2005 because an unsafe amount of pressure was applied to the non-insensitive high explosive while it was being disassembled.[3]". More sources of information on the "W56 mishap" exist, one of which refers to the nuclear detonation hazard and to statements made by workers at the plant where W56 mishap happened. Which of these sources should be used to provide more nearly accurate coverage of this notable mishap, a danger common to all W56 warheads?. Thanks in advance! loupgarous (talk) 01:26, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relevant information:

  • The source cited in the last sentence, reference three, "Mishap in dismantling nuclear warhead", United Press International, Dec. 15, 2006 at 1:27 PM says "the warhead nearly detonated in 2005", not "nearly experienced a high-explosive detonation with no nuclear yield" as our article says. The additional information "with no nuclear yield " is not in reference 3 or the other sources. The phrase "nearly experienced a high-explosive detonation with no nuclear yield" is unsourced. We have to change it, regardless of any other actions.
  • Danielle Brian, Executive Director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), stated in a letter dated December 12, 2006 to US Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman: " ...in March 2005, there was a “near-miss” event while disassembling another W56 warhead. Apparently the production technicians were using a faulty tool, putting too much pressure on the warhead. On November 29, 2006, Pantex was only fined $110,000 18 months after the near-miss incident. What was not made public at the time the fine was levied, however, is that according to safety experts knowledgeable about this event, it could actually have resulted in the detonation of the warhead. This incident was particularly dangerous because the W56 warhead was deployed in 1965, pre-dating the three basic enhanced safety features which reduce the possibility of an accidental detonation that are now required on more modern weapons." She attached a copy of the letter signed "Pantex Employees for Safe and Sustainable Operations"] referring to the "W56 HE cracking incident". No letters from the "safety experts knowledgeable about this event" who told POGO that a nuclear detonation could have resulted from this mishap are on the POGO web site or the Internet Archive of that site.

This seems to be the source for the information reported by UPI in reference three. Is it primary or secondary? The executive director of POGO refers to "safety experts knowledgeable about this event" (the W56 event) and to a letter signed by workers at the plant where the W56 mishap occurred.

While this is a blog entry (self-published) and of comparatively lower reliability than the UPI article or POGO's letter to the US Secretary of Energy (depending whether it's considered a primary or secondary source), it's also the opinion or someone with credentials to speak authoritatively on nuclear weapon safety issues.

It might be a good idea to quote Dr. Lewis and/or the late Mr. Hansen on the Pantex W56 mishap to balance the press reports based on POGO's letter to Secretary Bodman, and the letter from Pantex employees quoted by POGO, in order to make the article more closely NPOV. The relatively small pertinent excerpts from each of these sources could be paraphrased in a small paragraph in our article.

loupgarous (talk) 03:47, 21 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment: In principle I see no reason offhand why something of the type should be excluded. It might be a good idea however to take unusual care in the wording to ensure a balanced presentation; such topics are prone to lead to wall-of-text talk pages and edit wars. We cannot in conscience avoid topics for fear of that sort of thing, but a bit of foresight... JonRichfield (talk) 06:12, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Point well taken, and thanks for responding. On one hand, we have the UPI and a few other press outlets citing the POGO letter, and they are legitimate secondary source material. On the other hand, those reports failed to be plausible to someone like Jeffrey Lewis who is also cited as an authority by newspapers. I am disappointed that Dr. Lewis went to Swords of Armageddon and not a more authoritative source to dispute claims that a detonation on one side of a primary pit would cause a significant nuclear yield.
And perhaps POGO's sources were right and Dr. Lewis was wrong. When the Atomic Energy Commission, at the US military's urging, went to "sealed pit" nuclear weapon designs to make it unnecessary to put the fissile material of a nuclear bomb (the "pit") into the rest of the bomb manually before it became a working nuclear weapon, people were legitimately worried that some of these "wooden" bombs would fall out of airplanes (and they did) or the airplanes carrying them would crash and/or burn (and they did) and the explosives which compress the fissile material in these bombs and nuclear warheads to create a nuclear detonation would, in fact, blow up as a result (and on several occasions that happened, but there's no published evidence of a nuclear explosive yield after any accidental detonation of the explosives in a US nuclear weapon).
This led to the concept of "one-point safety", a requirement that US nuclear weapons be designed so there's less than one in a million chance they go off with a nuclear explosive yield equivalent to more than four kilograms of TNT if the explosives only go off at one point (there are no fewer than two shaped explosive charges that compress fissile material in a nuclear device, and both must detonate simultaneously to produce the desired nuclear explosion - but even if only one goes off, you could get a "fizzle" yield much smaller than the designed blast, and a lot of deadly radiation.).
The safety features to make one-point safety work were tested several times. According to the Nuclear Weapons Archive, "The first safety tests were known as Project 56 conducted in 1955 (of four shots, one failed - producing a yield of some tens of tons). In 1957 and 1958 three more limited test programs were conducted: Project 57, Project 58, and Project 58A. These three programs included a total of five test shots, most of them them producing some sort of nuclear yield (one an astonishing 500 tons)" (the author, Carey Sublette, does say later that the 500 ton yield resulted from a test intended to create a nuclear yield, in order to determine what the one-point safety warhead design limits were). But, there were "slight" nuclear yields from one-point safety tests of US nuclear warheads, and the W56 didn't even have a full set of those one-point safety features.
A reasonable take-away from this RFC might be that the existing UPI article cited in Reference three of our article as it now stands is more reliable than what Dr. Lewis had to say in his blog. Or the reverse might be true.
Or it might be more informative to the reader to replace the UPI article with a balanced presentation of information from Dr. Lewis's blog "W56 Safety Problem?" and the POGO letter to the US Department of Energy referring to the W56 mishap. That could be done in one long sentence or two much shorter ones. We'll have to change our article's last sentence anyway, as it contains an unsourced statement of fact, so this is an opportunity to make the article reflect the central assertions made by authoritative sources on the W56 mishap.
That's the consensus I'd like (one way or another) before making any changes to the article. loupgarous (talk) 16:00, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the advice, JFG and JonRichfield loupgarous (talk) 01:26, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
While waiting for other editors to comment on which sources to use in commenting generally on the W56 mishap, I made the one change unambiguously required to make the text conform to the source cited (reference 3) - replacing "nearly experienced a high-explosive detonation with no nuclear yield" with "nearly detonated", which is what reference 3 (cited after that sentence) actually says. I also cleaned up the grammar a bit, replacing a few passive voice constructions with active voice. Finally, I used the term "explosive lenses" to refer to what, handled with the wrong tool, might have caused that particular W56 warhead to detonate. loupgarous (talk) 22:53, 26 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I renew JFG's call for this to start with a short summary of what the RfC question is (if there really is one). I've waded though this textwall, and it still isn't clear to me. What I am getting out of this is something like "maybe or maybe not the current text is okay, and if it's not, we're not exactly sure why or what should be done about it; someone just has a vague sense that this isn't quite perfect per the WP:V and WP:NOR rules, and also has questions about what type of source is what, and also doesn't like one of the publication venues, and also is musing about one of the authors, and also seems simultaneously suspicious of newspapers are reliable for something like this while also wanting to rely on them as 'seconday' even if not accurate, and also ...". I'm tempted to remove the RfC tag from this, since it seems to be an earlier-stage and very unfocused discussion of potential issues and unrelated question, not the arrival at a specific course of action on which to seek consensus from the community. This may well be seven or so different questions/issues to resolved separately.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  10:11, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Primary sources are not barred - often the use of primary sources is a red flag for WP:OR but experienced editors should know how to use primary sources appropriately. The letter seems to be the strongest source of the three provided, if it is attributed I don't think there is any reason to exclude it. Seraphim System (talk) 04:40, 13 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Seems fine as is - summoned by Bot. I filled in the bare ref. Timtempleton (talk) 02:29, 15 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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