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Comment by cartoonfoxes | Hacker News Reader

While this one is urban legend, it's an interesting thought that there exist real and similarly code-named or pseudonymous highly secret chemicals, mechanisms and components which go into things like nuclear weapons. See: FOGBANK.

"The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified."

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Maybe they too are fake/non-existant, a kind of honey pot to catch external spy agencies or a way to distract them.

It's thought to be an aerogel that serves as an interstage material for suspending and transfering energy between the primary and secondary within a nuclear warhead.

Apparently they forgot how to make it, and had to reverse-engineer the original process. It's a neat story. See page 20 in https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_...

I seem to recall (from Dark Sun) that Ivy Mike used expanded polystyrene to fill/line the outer case of the weapon - it does seem that an aerogel would be a possible evolution of that.

If true, this would be an interesting case of a revealing code name -- "fog bank" is an apt description of the consistency of an aerogel.

Probably because it demanded low priority secrecy, since it isn't particularly dangerous, in and of itself.

Aerogels, having been invented in 1931, weren't directly secret, given that they appeared in scientific publications.

Meanwhile, it seems that the existing physics package designs had been optimized for a specific type of aerogel, and that the level of precision to maximize yield accounted for impurities introduced by the specific technique that had produced previous batches.

The nature of the secret seems to have been a gremlin, both incidental and intrinsic to the design of the contraption. And yet not aerogel specifically.

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