Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep @slip_trace Twitter profile

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

5 months

Plutonium Metallurgy, The Nuclear Stockpile, and You (a🧵) All good effortposts should start with a hot take. Mine is that this diagram is one of the most important doodles in the entire national security world. Materials scientists rarely get to stake such bold claims, so, why?

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

6 months

Hello fellow Texans, is me, comrade Djason from Texas Oblast. I work at State Central Factory #330 For Automotive Forgings Named After David Crockett just like many of you.

Jack’s House 🇺🇦

@FluteMagician

6 months

This is obviously a Russian. Only Russia talks about the value of a warm water port. Because the US as a whole has several and this has never been an issue for us.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

>fire a salvo of ballistic missiles over Hawaii This would be one way to finally find out if the USA has a launch on warning posture, lol, lmao (PRC turbohawks continue to be one of the funniest demographics on this site)

Zhao DaShuai 东北进修🇨🇳

@zhao_dashuai

3 months

Things China needs to do before 2026. 1️⃣Sail our carrier battle groups to Hawaii. 2️⃣Fire a salvo of ballistic missiles over Hawaii as our carrier group approaches. 3️⃣Scrap the "No First Use" nuclear weapon policy. This will serve as China's Great White Fleet moment.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

I've said it before and I will keep saying it. You guys get this stuff wrong because your field is allergic to domain knowledge. You think you can apply first principles econ reasoning to all topics, and you get huffy when the scientists and policy practitioners step in.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

@Emma_Pike_ You have got to stop wilfully misreading your opponents if you want to be taken seriously in your career. Outside the disarmament bubble, your reputation is going to be someone to ignore and not engage with, if this continues to be the level of debate you bring to the table.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

6 months

@FahadMAlam You'll be singing a different tune when Russia intervenes to defend the rights of ethnic Boomhauer accent havers against the HATO neonazi regime in Austin.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

@peck_oh It would be hard for me to believe this wouldn't prompt one of the more maximalist counterforce options on the oplan, joking aside. It would be a horrific tragedy for the Chinese people if some giga-hawk idiot managed to convince them to do this.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@michaeldweiss @InsiderEng @60Minutes @derspiegel Physics of undetectable, otherwise asymptomatic microwave-induced TBI don't pass much of a sniff test. If you're dumping enough energy into the head to burst blood vessels, you'd expect visible damage to the skin no? Myelin damage? Why no neuropathy in the external tissues?

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

1 year

@talexratcliffe @AltHistCody The introduction of crack cocaine into the twitter bluecheck population has been an ongoing disaster for many months now

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

7 months

If only the cheap FPV drone obsessed terminal GS-12s and their fellow magazine depth screeching retard cohort could see this. Sadly they have mostly blocked any of the few intelligent defense observers on this site.

Doha

@Doha104p3

7 months

USS Dewey (DDG-105) shooting down a target drone w LaWS

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

2 months

Clearly the CCP's efforts to reduce drug abuse have not prevented this lady from maintaining a spectacular crack habit.

Zhao DaShuai 东北进修🇨🇳

@zhao_dashuai

2 months

The importance of a China-Russia alliance in one picture. By forming a united front, we can by-pass the biggest defense barrier of the US; The Pacific Ocean. We can create a local superiority in the Bering Strait and start our liberation of North America.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

22 days

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

Reviewing the simulations chapter in an old AIAA volume "Tactical Missile Warheads" (ed. Joseph Carleone) and there was a minor jump-scare in this citation.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

@SwannMarcus89 "Anyone else ends up enslaved" is a wild thing to say if you've literally been arrested for human trafficking

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

@SwannMarcus89 Never ever let them forget that the CHAZ People's Security Forces shot more unarmed black boys in like 72 hours than Seattle PD had in years.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@mattkorda @russianforces The backlash has little to do with her gender and a lot to do with the content of the video. It's profoundly disingenuous to act as though the majority of the pushback in the comments is solely the result of sexism. Is that in there? Yes. But it's not most of it.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@m_knight7 @Emma_Pike_ Most of the top comments on the video are critiques on substance, what are you on about?

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

@SwannMarcus89

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@SwannMarcus89 Also... Not to be unkind, but do these people understand that the supply chains for HRT drugs will collapse pretty early in any revolution?

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

This is a fun question that I spent most of grad school pondering. Right now we are actually living through a step change in our understanding of the atomic & nanometer scale origins of material properties. This is spurred by computing power & our ability to see at the nanoscale.

Matt Costlow

@Matt_Costlow

4 months

I’ll ask this one publicly. (Please understand, coming from someone who isn’t a physical scientist) Is metallurgy destined for a series of incremental advances, or are revolutionary advances still possible in the future? And what does that look like? And mean?

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

Huh, apparently I said this to him enough times before that he blocked me for it. Symptomatic of the behavior I'm describing.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

This is a non zero part of why I don't realname post here. I don't need some idiot calling my manager because I said something rude to him on twitter.

John Ridge 🇺🇸 🇺🇦

@John_A_Ridge

4 months

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

You don't hate Greenpeace enough. I realize you're making a valiant effort, but it's simply impossible. (The >100,000 deaths figure is global, not for the Philippines alone. Small caveat.)

Mark Lynas

@mark_lynas

3 months

Greenpeace and its allies just won a court case in the Philippines blocking Golden Rice from reaching millions of vitamin A-deficient young children. If this isn't a crime against humanity, I don't know what is. Avoidable deaths could total 100,000s. More:

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

6 months

@ThrustWR >try to start thread about hidden gem books >no engagement >shitpost about low effort Russian influence ops >massive response many such cases

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@SwannMarcus89 This is why institutional tolerance for communists and (even moreso) anarchists has to be zero. They're not interested in participating in your feedback processes, politically they are actually not interested in being citizens in any recognizable way - literally just ignore them.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

2 months

Look I'm all for the gender equalization of the sugar daddy dynamic but the zoomers have *got* to come up with a less vile name for it

Armand Domalewski

@ArmandDoma

2 months

in my hagmaxxer era

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

Santa, for the 2026 World Cup I want B-21s, F-22s/-35s carrying yellow band AIM-260s, an E-4, an EA-37B blasting enough jamming ERP that you can feel it in your dental fillings, and fireworks delivered by ARRW.

John Ridge 🇺🇸 🇺🇦

@John_A_Ridge

5 months

The Europeans will never recover from the flyovers for the 2026 World Cup

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

1 month

Are you fucking kidding me? Just when you think the NYT can't sink any lower. What is the benefit for such wishy washy "humanizing" treatments of some of the worst war criminals of the modern age?

Neil MacFarquhar

@NeilMacFarquhar

1 month

Stunning images in @nytimes today from Bakhmut and Chechnya by @HeitmannNanna who spent time with soldiers in both places, many of them former fighters with the disbanded #Wagner mercenary army. #Russia #UkraineWar

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

2/ This crowded graph is the composition-temperature phase diagram for alloys of plutonium with gallium. The shaded-in section marked "δ" is essential to our ability to make thermonuclear bombs and to trust that they will still work after 40 years sitting in a hole in Wyoming.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

11 days

The inevitable inquest about the Secret Service's failure to secure a rooftop apparently just 125 meters away from their protectee's speech is going to be very interesting.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

2 months

Saw a very spicy trash can today.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

Obligatory and hopefully *stupefyingly obvious* disclaimer that everything in here can be found in unclassified and uncontrolled public facing journal publications and textbooks, and is not being assembled in a way which ought produce classification by compilation concerns.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

One of my objectively worst technical opinions is that I wanted to let them keep going with this, just to see what came out of it.

William "Balloon Guy" Kim

@TheKimulation

4 months

The Army in 2018 pitching 1000-mile artillery to stay relevant in the Indo-Pacific

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

It is bedtime for now; expect part 2 in the next couple days, covering corrosion behavior and a couple other things. A third part delving into electronic structure and the underlying physics of why plutonium is the way it is, after that.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

Something something foreign and domestic.

Bryan Baca

@TheBryanBaca

5 months

#JackPosobiec #CPAC "I just wanted to say welcome to the end of democracy. We're here to overthrow it completely, we didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here, we'll replace it with this right here."

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@SwannMarcus89 Either they're fake jobs in the activism-industrial complex or pic related

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

1 month

@83dollaroring @Link_Plumeria Here, have this warm rock. It just stays warm, on its own, for longer than the oldest man in your village can remember.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

One of the more eye-popping declassified docs I've ever encountered. Detailed performance characteristics for Minuteman III circa 1985, including reliability statistics and Pk assessments. S/o @ThrustWR & @John_A_Ridge for putting this on my radar

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

2 months

retvrn to tradition please

Michael McLean

@cornoisseur

2 months

@ArmandDoma In 1970, Sierra Club voted in favor of building a nuclear plant for San Francisco. Their conservation campaign: “Atoms, not dams”

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

@peck_oh Unless we had advance warning, I guess, and just... shot the missiles down? This would be a weird thing to respond to, if you knew in advance that it was bluster. Can't look weak domestically, can't let the PRC think they can do this with no response, but if it's just bluster...

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

6 months

@GravitysRa1nbow personally cannot wait for the BRVTHER PEOPLVS of the PLA and US armed forces to unite against the common enemy: the field grade officer

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

@BeijingPalmer Personally I think the position she's staking out is likelier to lead to Pelagianism. Christological heresies are so passé, let's get some ponerological heresies in the mix.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

8 months

@GravitysRa1nbow >Houthis make a threat which leaves something to chance >"They don't understand schelling" Pick one brah

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

7/ A diversion into unclassified nuclear weapon principles, since I think it helps to understand. Plutonium weapons are assumed to be implosion type devices. A hollow sphere of Pu is *uniformly* compressed very fast into a critical mass by precise application of high explosives.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

4/ Most familiar engineering materials have two or three relevant crystal structures depending on temperature and composition. Plutonium has *six* at normal pressure, plus a seventh at very high pressure. Worse, the densities are very different and several are "uncooperative".

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

12/ Problem solved right? Add 2% gallium and we're off to the races. This was true for a while. During the Cold War we tested *constantly* (just over 1000 total) and warheads were recycled relatively often. Then History Ended(tm), and we stopped testing. And this happened.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

9/ This problem was realized in mid-1944 as Manhattan Project scientists grappled with scatter in their density measurements. Early Pu alloy design was largely trial and error; by chance it was discovered that Ga, Al and several other elements stabilize the delta phase.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

3/ How? Why? Let's zoom out for a moment. Actually we will zoom in, to a magnification of about one million times the naked eye. Now we can see the arrangement of the atoms in a piece of plutonium, what we call the crystal structure. And for plutonium it's a bit of a mess.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

14/ Radiation damage is complicated and out of scope for this thread (go read a textbook, I recommend Gary Was' personally), but we can make some gross generalizations. Energetic particles (neutrons, heavy ions and alphas) can knock atoms out of their positions in a crystal.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

1 month

@bipedleek @Iron_Man_Actual Every time lmfao

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

@Matt_Costlow Wen Ho Lee is a minorly infamous case within the weapons world - he was indicted but acquitted in '99 for selling nuclear weapons data to the PRC while he worked at LANL, as part of the "how did China get W88 info" debacle.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

6/ The delta phase in pure plutonium only exists above ~310° Celsius, and is not usually retained at room temperature even with fast quenching. The large density increase going from delta to alpha also causes extensive microcracking. For any practical purpose, pure Pu won't do.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

10/ The effect is pronounced. The retention of the delta phase to room temp in plutonium-gallium alloys improves our casting quality, our solid state processing (rolling, forging, hot pressing etc), and the mechanical properties of the final part.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

13/ Show of hands, what do radioactive materials do over time? They age. They self-irradiate, which damages the material at the atomic scale. These defects, plus decay heat, can cause phase changes (like a very slow heat treat). They transmute, changing the composition slightly.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

17/ And now an important nuance. See, for most of the Cold War we thought that that lovely delta phase in Pu-Ga was stable at room temperature. Actually (as the Russians knew before us), delta Pu-Ga is *meta*stable. With the right "push", it will transform to the alpha phase.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

11/ Why gallium and not plutonium-aluminum? Aluminum has undesirable alpha-capture transmutation behavior. Aluminum captures alpha particles from Pu-239 decay: the Al-27+a-->P-30+n reaction kicks off an extra neutron, which can tip the neutron economy in Pu towards a fizzle.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

8/ What if you explosively compress a pit made of brittle material? Or one full of cracks? The uniformity suffers; in a worst case, you might have so much inconsistency that the weapon "fizzles" and only some of the Pu participates in criticality.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

@Support You won't do anything about the mobs of terrorists, sanctions violating Russian armament suppliers, or your own boss' crippling amphetamine dependency but you have time for this? pls fix

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

6 months

@The_Ops_Room Hey, how did all those Haradrim POWs wind up dead?

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

If you would like a vision of the circle of Hell to which sinful engineers are sent, it is this tweet, stamping on our faces, forever.

Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq.

@clapifyoulikeme

4 months

Stop talking to me about physics. I don’t care. They should figure out a better design.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

5/ "Uncooperative"? Crystals with low symmetry tend to be brittle, and indeed the alpha and beta phases of plutonium are normally brittle. Contrast with the face-centered cubic structure of the delta phase: very ductile, almost the same as aluminum in fact.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

21/ Those defects affect the rate of diffusion in the material, which affects RIS behavior...see what I mean? Esteemed LANL metallurgist (and onetime lab director) Sig Hecker called plutonium "a physicist's dream and a metallurgist's nightmare" for a reason.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

18 days

Sorry but this is a pretty shit take. SpaceX could be revolutionizing launch infrastructure exactly as well as they currently are, while not flouting simple environmental protections. It is a conscious leadership decision to cut corners and act like they're above the law.

Jordan Schneider

@jordanschnyc

18 days

Shot: successful Starship launch, maybe the most impressive industrial accomplishment of the century, set to revolutionize humanity's relationship with space as it exponentially reduces the cost of launch Chaser: NYT: but you broke a few dozen eggs!

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

18/ At room temperature, the kinetics (rate) for this transformation are so slow that we've never seen it in real weapons material. But it *can* happen, and we don't fully know how this will play out as the oldest weapons in the stockpile approach 50 years old.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

I have to say I find it a little head-scratching that Jacobsen's book is the post the leading arms control advocates want to hang the movement's hat on. Its easily discredited factual inaccuracies and over-reliance on controversial figures like Ted Postol makes it an easy target.

Hans Kristensen

@nukestrat

3 months

Here’s another review of @AnnieJacobsen ’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario. Given how much coverage she’s getting - and how much time nuclear advocates are spending discrediting it - she has clearly hit a nerve about nuclear fears in our time.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

Making fun of these weirdos aside, I would love to know - is this a "bit" aimed at gullible Western 5th columnists, is it just bored social media trolling or is there a real hawkish youth cadre in the ranks? Are we gonna have to worry about PLA Curtis Lemay for the next 40 years?

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

26 days

The tweet in question was pretty obnoxious & this whole affair encapsulates a trend I've noticed for years (and my mentors have noticed for decades before). The anti nuclear crowd can say whatever nasty, slanderous things they like, but if we say one word back we're the assholes.

Fabian Hoffmann

@FRHoffmann1

27 days

Quick disclaimer: I make it a point not to be disrespectful or get personal first. However, I also believe in matching the energy I receive. If you accuse the employees of NATO's Nuclear Policy Directorate of being into "planning war crimes and killing millions," I feel

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

15/ This damage produces lasting defects. Point defects are a missing atom or an atom where there shouldn't be one (vacancies and interstitials respectively). Dislocations are line defects; think of a line of point defects in a row.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

Also since today's ✨ discourse ✨ is about the lack of civility lately in Defense Twitter, I think it's very funny that Mike of all people gets on his high horse about how rude the college kiddos are when he's basically Patient Zero for being abrasive for the sake of it.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

If you're in your 20s-30s and your circle isn't discussing: Intercritical annealing Extended deterrence The Third Offset Conventional counterforce Shock Hugoniots Proliferated space constellations Electron microscopy You need to get a new circle. Your network is your net worth.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

6 months

On my knees begging and pleading conventional force understanders to have nuke opinions even a quarter as smart as their conventional force opinions (this is not one of them)

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

broke: gravity bomb B61-13 are destabilizing because something something Obama promised woke: gravity bomb B61-13 are destabilizing because the lack of standoff decreases the survivability of the NATO sharing DCA fleet and thereby undermines our extended deterrent credibility

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

@BulletinAtomic

5 months

The US Pentagon pursuing a type of nuclear weapon called a gravity bomb "is a troubling development for many reasons," writes Stephen Young of @UCSUSA . Read more below:

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

20/ For instance, Pu self-heats by decay heat; Pu-238 enriched alloys heat more. We know that radiation-induced defects will anneal themselves out at some temperature dependent rate. Is the rate of defect generation and annihilation the same in enriched and weapons-grade Pu?

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@slip_trace

5 months

16/ The generation and motion of these defects can cause chemical inhomogeneity on short scales (nanometers to microns), or "radiation-induced segregation". RIS in Pu causes some rejection of Ga into a Pu3Ga precipitate; drop the Ga content and the delta phase gets less stable.

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@slip_trace

5 months

23/ The alpha decay of Pu-239 to U-235 and a helium nucleus fills the lattice with He atoms. Helium has near zero solubility in solid metals, so it tends to cluster and eventually form small bubbles. In conjunction with vacancy defects, this causes the metal to swell.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

29 days

@GravitysRa1nbow You could have made that a reality for one brief moment of glory at the parallel.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

14 days

So...how many of these plans do we have to fail to stop before anyone will dare utter the words Article V? Failure to deter has consequences.

Natasha Bertrand

@NatashaBertrand

14 days

Breaking exclusive: The US and Germany foiled a Russian plot to assassinate the chief executive of the powerful German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, which has been producing shells and equipment for Ukraine. with @KatieBoLillis @fpleitgenCNN

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5 months

25/ We don't have a solid handle on how bubbles change the mechanical behavior yet. From the accel'd aging study we know there is some strengthening (Δσ_ys up to 120 MPa!) from aging but mechanisms unclear. Can imagine consequences for M&S etc. Hit thread limit, pt 2 to follow...

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

27 days

@GravitysRa1nbow Just-in-time manufacturing consent

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

19/ An accelerated aging study with 238-enriched Pu at LLNL suggests that we should be okay out to the 90 year mark. Are the accelerated aging studies representative of aging in real conditions? I'm not so sure. There are so many factors to disentangle. So many coupled behaviors.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

As is often the case, Zach has said my own thoughts for me already. The US is not perfect, but if you think our conduct is the same as Russia and China with regards to arms control, proliferation, and the ethics of nuclear deterrence - you're either a moron or compromised.

Zach

@ThrustWR

4 months

One thing that concerns me is the growing and very strong appeals to realist views (not in the sense of might makes right type bullshit), in some nuke/disarmament circles when it comes to how we view or should view our adversaries.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

Tell me you don't really know dick beyond surface level about propulsion without telling me outright. I'm always confused what midwits like this think the R&D teams at places like this *do* with their time - because I can comfortably say firsthand, the innovation is there.

Andrew Côté

@Andercot

4 months

It would be mistaken to say companies like Pratt and Whitney have not innovated on jet engine design in the last 70+ years of making them. For example, 13 years ago they added this single gear between the compressor stage and turbofan at a program cost of only $10 billion. 🧵

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

24/ How much swelling? A few tenths of a percent, at most. The model estimates below jive with the LLNL accelerated aging experiment. Not a huge amount, but as you can see the upper bound runs away with time and could become trouble in the future. (It does eventually saturate.)

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

22/ Fortunately, it looks like the composition changes from nuclear transmutation don't really affect the chemical stability of the material on any time scale we've measured yet. But there is one composition effect that really does matter: helium generation.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

This kind of analysis always struck me as stupid for 2 reasons. 1 you have weapon systems to use them for effects, not just to hold them perpetually as a secret reserve. 2, use of a new weapon does not automatically reveal all its traits to an enemy. We know this from history.

Fadi Quran

@fadiquran

3 months

On Iran’s strike: At Stanford, I attended a masterclass on military strategy led by a person with decades of experience, including serving at the highest levels in the military and government. One lesson he thought that I always remember was this: He asked us: “Say the US

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@SwannMarcus89 3500 people *total* died during the Troubles. October 7th represents a worse civilian death toll than entire decades of the troubles.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

Listening to @the_engi_nerd give a rundown of some FY25 budget hearings for USAF/USAF. "Big mood" as the kids say. This is why we are friends.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

Look us STEMoids are terribly dismissive and all that but any scientist or engineer who claims to have never endured an econ, history, sociology, etc major lazily mis-explaining your own field to you is simply repressing a traumatic memory

girl so confusing i mean they

@finelylesberg

3 months

humanities scholars see a STEM topic they don't understand and think "damn, guess i don't understand that. they must be smart" while STEM people see a humanities topic they don't understand & go "they must just be making shit up"

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

We used to be a real country. In the glory days the CIA would have offed Ben-Gvir years ago.

Wesley Morgan

@wesleysmorgan

3 months

A cabinet minister suggesting that fewer prisoners should be taken from the battlefield and more killed would be egregious in any government—but this is especially so for a uniquely rank-agnostic, decentralized citizen army where the chief of staff is effectively competing…

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

Absolute junk opinion. Have you been to a public land grant R1 university, ever? In most metrics you can think of except maybe how rich their parents are, the people at Texas A&M or U Wisconsin Madison or Purdue are at least as "quality" as the Ivies. Gross, lazy elitism.

Paul Graham

@paulg

3 months

@NateSilver538 Social clout and quality of education aren't the only two factors in the value of a university. There's another that's even more important: the quality of the other people there. And like it or not, that will be higher at an elite university.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

6 months

oh my God wait until these sheltered dimwits hear about stuff like NDSEG, DOD SMART, NNSA SSGF/MSIPP, or the number of universities with a SCIF hidden somewhere on campus. Vannevar Bush stays winning 50 years after he passed

plazy ☾*✲⋆.

@plazynoodles

6 months

because why the hell would a university be involved with weapons manufacturers??? what????? fuck imperialism

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

If you want "negotiations" or "peace" at the expense of Ukrainian sovereignty, at the expense of a generation of rape and torture, fuck you. Fuck. You. That goes triple for you @DavidSacks you fat, treasonous asshole. There is a God, and He is harsh in His judgement of your type.

Ralph Janík

@RalphJanik

4 months

The full report on Russian war crimes is here: read it. This is the reality of its war. No peace, nowhere, for no one.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

Any time Trent runs his mouth, I want everyone to remember 3 things. 1) He retired after 20+ yrs as a GS-12, a pay grade often passed by competent people before the age of 30. 2) He is not an engineer. He was a DCMA QC auditor, "the perfect definition of a mindless bureaucrat."

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

5 months

One of the great failures of Western strategic & political thought in the last 3 decades has been our inability to see that almost everyone left in the Russosphere, from the highest leaders to the common man on the street, started sniffing glue in December 1991 and never stopped.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@GravitysRa1nbow Compromise to make EVERYONE mad: a free car for people who love to fare evade, but it's full of people smoking crack. The fare car is crack free. People caught fare evading in the crack free car are forced to become crack addicts by the state.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

1 year

@RealDarthDrumpf @gcal2600 @WallStreetSilv If you listen to conservative social media, we're cool as fuck

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

4 months

@Lprochon So he...pulled a random 55% probability out of his rear end and did some basic math from there? I would have failed undergrads for this kind of fuzzy reasoning.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

@ArmsControlWonk @Emma_Pike_ Surely a man with a PhD in this field is well aware that almost nobody has ever claimed they deter *all* conventional attack. And that this is well trodden ground since the 50s.

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

2 months

It's a nice story but it's built on the assumptions that (a) Russian guarantees are worth the paper they're written on, even in the nuclear realm, and (b) that China feels bound by Russian requirements. Also there's more than one way to breed weapons grade Pu...

Pavel Podvig

@russianforces

2 months

So, in my view, this undermines both US claims: that China will use its breeders to produce plutonium for weapons, and that it will have 1,000 warheads by 2030. Things don't quite add up. 7/7

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Rocky Flats Chimney Sweep

@slip_trace

3 months

Of all the obvious forgotten lessons of the Cold War this is the one that really should be impossible to forget. *Everyone* has skin in the game in a nuclear war. If officials in the PRC are so stupid or so hardheaded as to forget this, we are in for dangerous times.

c_fr_12

@c_fr_12

3 months

@slip_trace She allegedly had relatives in the propaganda dept of the CCP, and uses that to larp as the same. She’s says some absolutely absurd shit. Begging for policies that immediately lead to WW III is really something coming from someone with no skin in the game.

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