Information regarding US nuclear weapons, especially the materials used as components, is still kept in the strictest confidence. Take the same Fogbank - they write about it often and a lot, but what it is, until recently, no one figured out in detail.
Back in 2009, there were reports in the world media that the US National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) lacked the technological knowledge to produce the Fogbank material, and therefore it could be stopped for up to 25 years.
For the first time, Fogbank attracted the attention of the world media even earlier, in 2007-2008, when it became known that problems with this material caused technical delays in extending the life of the W76 warhead. The W76 series is used by submarines of the US Navy and the Royal Navy of Great Britain.
There is material that we are currently using, and it is in the facility that we built … at Y-12, - said in 2007, speaking to members of the House of Representatives of the US Congress, the then director of the NNSA, Thomas D'Agostino.
Apparently, the speech in the official's statement was about a complex for the production of nuclear weapons, located near the National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Details of what Fogbank is, Thomas D'Agostino did not even disclose to congressmen. He only emphasized:
This is a very difficult piece of material … call it Fogbank. It is not classified, but it is material that is very important to our W76 life extension activities.
A little later, talking to the senators, the director of the NNSA called Fogbank "inter-stage material." This statement by Thomas D'Agostino allowed experts to make a variety of guesses about the nature of the material. They suggested that this is an airgel, which acts as an intermediate material in the warhead, surrounding the parts of the bomb in which fission and fusion occurs, and providing energy transfer between them.
Clay brick weighing 2.5 kg stands on a block of airgel weighing only 2 grams
Missile and nuclear weapons expert Jeffrey Lewis at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey said in 2008 that the codename Fogbank could have been derived from aerogel names such as "frozen smoke" and "fog over San Francisco."
According to publicly available information, it is clear that the Fogbank was produced at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee from 1975 to 1989. It was used as an essential material in the W76.
Property in Tennessee
When in 1996 the White House decided to replace or modernize some of the US nuclear weapons and decommission some of them, the development of a reconstruction program began, involving an increase in the service life of old nuclear weapons.
As a result, in 2000, the NNSA presented a program to extend the life of the W76 warheads, but it soon became clear that the Fogbank material would become a source of inevitable problems in the implementation of the program. The thing is that during the initial production of this material in the 1980s, the production process was practically not recorded, and all the specialists who participated in its production several decades ago have retired.
However, NNSA decided they could repeat the manufacturing process once the material had already been produced. But the organization's engineers faced numerous hurdles over and over again, despite the NNSA committing $ 23 million to the task.
It wasn't until March 2007 that NNSA engineers were able to develop a manufacturing process for creating Fogbank, but problems started again during testing. In September 2007, the status of the project was increased and only in 2008, after spending another $ 69 million, NNSA manufactured the Fogbank and delivered the first repaired warhead seven months later to the US Navy. But then, oddly enough, a naval spokesman said the navy had never received the recovered weapons.
In the same 2008, it became known that President Barack Obama had canceled the program to modernize nuclear warheads. The NNSA started talking about the need to develop a new material that could replace very expensive and difficult-to-manufacture components.
Work on the new W93 nuclear warhead has prompted American leaders to wonder if there will be another major delay in the production of large quantities of weapons. In March 2020, the U. S. Government Accountability Office recalled past difficulties with the production of top-secret Fogbank material:
Future weapons programs will require new explosives produced, including those that the NNSA has not produced on a scale since 1993.
Since the production of the W93 is based on old technologies, there is no doubt that the NNSA will return (or have already returned) to the use of Fogbank. Using the history of this material as an example, we see how the increased secrecy of development and the production process not only protects the technologies used in the defense sector, but also acts as an obstacle to their reuse: the production process was not documented and it actually has to be restored anew.
