00:00:00.000,00:00:05.005 >>Audio's good? >>Yes >>Okay so I'm 3AlarmLampScooter and uh today I'm giving a talk on DIY 00:00:07.374,00:00:11.612 Nukeproofing so, show of hands real quick, anyone here try to come to this talk last year? 00:00:11.612,00:00:18.318 Anyone? Anyone? We've got a few okay. Anyone spotted as a fed in the spot the fed panel that uh 00:00:18.318,00:00:23.857 replaced this talk last year? [chuckle] Okay guess no one's that brave. So anyways [chuckle] 00:00:23.857,00:00:28.862 ah got a little, a little background radiation I guess you'd say as far as uh 00:00:28.862,00:00:33.433 motivations for this. I originally submitted this talk to CFP uh with some outstanding 00:00:33.433,00:00:37.237 questions as to what exactly that I could and couldn't discuss uh there was actually 00:00:37.237,00:00:40.574 some information in this talk that was pretty previously classified but has since been 00:00:40.574,00:00:45.879 published in an open access journal and uh I couldn't- I couldn't deliver that content 00:00:45.879,00:00:50.250 last year as it had not yet been published and uh now I'm you know not afraid of ending up in 00:00:50.250,00:00:54.021 getmode to discuss it that info specifically is uh third generation laser isotope 00:00:54.021,00:00:57.925 separation technology. In addition to that unfortunately there was some tritium 00:00:57.925,00:01:03.196 implicitly imported for the black badges last year and uh also I was warned you know, 00:01:03.196,00:01:06.533 don't- don't get caught up in that. So I guess that's- that's a little bit about background. 00:01:06.533,00:01:10.704 I'm really trying to keep this fast 'cause we've only got like what? Ten minutes or whatever. 00:01:10.704,00:01:15.375 Anyways, so we're just going to talk about physics a little bit uh as we move into DIY 00:01:15.375,00:01:20.614 Nukeproofing. Uh there's kind of more fear uncertainty and doubt surrounding nuclear weapons than 00:01:20.614,00:01:25.252 uh perhaps any other technology out there especially their hypothetical capabilities in 00:01:25.252,00:01:29.356 electronic warfare, of course Defcon is a computer security conference and nuclear weapons 00:01:29.356,00:01:33.193 and fortunately for the most part have not done much physical damage in the last seven decades 00:01:33.193,00:01:36.897 outside of some cold war accidents however Defcon did originally stand for defense 00:01:36.897,00:01:40.867 condition and I think it's a valuable form to look at how the confluence of factors in 00:01:40.867,00:01:45.639 technologies are uh causing what you can basically refer to as a changing threat landscape on the 00:01:45.639,00:01:50.944 nuclear side. Uh so to really brock the gestalt of nuclear weapons and the threat landscape 00:01:50.944,00:01:57.184 that has been there in the past uh we kind of have to go back to a little quick remedial physical 00:01:57.184,00:02:01.888 lesson you've got uh two different main isotopes of Uranium and Uranium two thirty- 00:02:01.888,00:02:06.994 [audience shouting] >>It's really hard to understand >>Okay let me try and speak up a little 00:02:06.994,00:02:10.931 bit more, so we're gonna have a uh like a ninety second remedial physics lesson here if my 00:02:10.931,00:02:14.134 microphone could work properly [laugh] we've got two different isotopes of Uranium that are 00:02:14.134,00:02:18.438 kind of important to all this, one of them is Uranium 235 the other is Uranium 238 they uh 00:02:18.438,00:02:23.543 differ by three neutrons and that is why they have different mass and uh a kind of the real 00:02:23.543,00:02:27.047 short version of this- I had a lot more prepared- but you can use what's called the kinetic 00:02:27.047,00:02:32.986 isotope effect to separate uh the hi- uh the lighter from the heavier uranium and uh the 00:02:32.986,00:02:37.357 lighter uranium 235 actually is what's called fissile material, if you hit it with a neutron it 00:02:37.357,00:02:42.696 can sustain a nuclear reaction if it's enriched above around five percent usually unless it's 00:02:42.696,00:02:47.434 a you know pressurized light water reactor uh anyways the uh the heavier uranium isotope is 00:02:47.434,00:02:50.971 much more stable, has about four and a half billion year half life whereas the uh lighter 00:02:50.971,00:02:55.876 uranium isotopes about seven hundred million years and uh if you manage to get about a fifty 00:02:55.876,00:03:00.781 seven kilogram ball of this lighter isotope separated out of the heavy stuff that's naturally 00:03:00.781,00:03:05.919 occurring at ninety nine point seven er sorry ninety nine point three percent. Naturally uranium 00:03:05.919,00:03:10.390 you can uh you can actually make a- a physics package as they euphemistically call uh a 00:03:10.390,00:03:15.395 nuclear weapons uh with again about fifty seven kilograms as a minimum uh for the 235 content 00:03:17.764,00:03:22.502 uh interestingly uh uranium 238 is also not just a nerd filler you can actually hit it with a 00:03:22.502,00:03:27.808 neutron and it will undergo a transmutation to plutonium 239 which is also fissile material 00:03:27.808,00:03:32.012 actually has about a uh ten kilogram critical mass that translates to about the size of 00:03:32.012,00:03:36.650 a baseball uh but you need a nuclear reactor that's running to do that, so that is a very 00:03:36.650,00:03:42.522 difficult thing for a anything but a really a nation state actor to do whereas as I'll get 00:03:42.522,00:03:48.261 to this uh U235 route to uh a physics package is becoming more practical for a potential 00:03:48.261,00:03:54.134 proliferator. So moving on a little bit more uh we kind of had the original proliferation 00:03:54.134,00:03:58.805 was uh was really the United States in Manhattan project back around World War two and I 00:03:58.805,00:04:02.542 really again won't touch on too much here I'll just try and go with the very basics but kind of 00:04:02.542,00:04:06.980 the one on the uh the device on the right there was called Fat Man that was a plutonium 00:04:06.980,00:04:11.451 implosion style device again you need a nuclear reactor to build that uh pretty difficult to come 00:04:11.451,00:04:16.389 up with the plutonium uh you also need explosive lensing because plutonium is uh 00:04:16.389,00:04:20.660 naturally liable to kind of go off ahead of time whereas uranium isn't uh you need to 00:04:20.660,00:04:24.331 slam several pieces of the plutonium together at a very high speed and that's also 00:04:24.331,00:04:28.135 something that's non trivial with explosives engineering. The one on the left uh Little Boy 00:04:28.135,00:04:32.939 which was dropped on uh Hiroshima versus Fat Man was dropped on uh on Nagasaki uh the 00:04:32.939,00:04:37.377 one on the left is much much easier to build uh again as I'll get to because of third 00:04:37.377,00:04:42.749 generation laser light strip separation uh so moving on again real quick and I'm skipping over 00:04:42.749,00:04:47.420 so much content but I want to get into essentially the USSR you know Soviet Russia at the 00:04:47.420,00:04:52.125 time- ripped off uh the US' design they had a spy named Klaus Fuchs in Manhattan 00:04:52.125,00:04:57.664 project, he turned over a lot of diagrams and uh information on the US' army in the Manhattan 00:04:57.664,00:05:01.868 project over to the Rosenbergs who were subsequently electrocuted for their spying by 00:05:01.868,00:05:06.873 the US and uh then the USSR made uh RDS-1 or Stalin's Jet Engine and that kind of really got the 00:05:09.142,00:05:14.147 Cold War into uh into over drive you could say um So anyways moving on from there uh there 00:05:17.250,00:05:21.388 was of course further R and D in nuclear weapons and this is honestly not super duper 00:05:21.388,00:05:25.592 relevant to the presentation either, there were what were called teller-ulam devices which 00:05:25.592,00:05:30.931 is where you have a nuclear fusion reaction going on near a fission reaction and uh again 00:05:30.931,00:05:35.635 that actually requires a hydrogen isotope called tritium it's quite rare and there have 00:05:35.635,00:05:41.541 not been any big breakthroughs recently in in producing er uh er in uh separating tritium out 00:05:41.541,00:05:46.513 from regular hydrogen so that's again not super duper relevant other than you know the largest 00:05:46.513,00:05:51.952 fireworks out there essentially try- tsar bomba was uh weighed over fifty megaton detonation 00:05:51.952,00:05:56.957 that the USSR did. Uh so moving on again [chuckle] uh there were a lot of other countries that 00:05:59.993,00:06:06.499 you know proliferated and uh there was the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, etc. I kind of 00:06:06.499,00:06:10.570 call them all the nuclear also rans. Most of them didn't do anything to uh necessarily 00:06:10.570,00:06:15.542 innovative uh but one of the big exceptions to that which was interesting from a strategy 00:06:15.542,00:06:20.480 perspective, and I'll get into strategy a get- uh again in a second is uh Israel, and they've 00:06:20.480,00:06:25.318 officially maintained nuclear ambiguity uh supposedly they might have set off a nuke in 00:06:25.318,00:06:30.957 1979 called the- the Vela incident somewhere in the uh [whistles] you know exact se- 00:06:30.957,00:06:36.062 but anyways the Vela incident in nine- 1979 was supposedly a test of theirs but they don't confirm 00:06:36.062,00:06:41.201 or deny that they have nuclear weapons so all outside sources have that kind of graph on the 00:06:41.201,00:06:47.007 right there as a uh as a probability distribution of how much plutonium they likely have 00:06:47.007,00:06:51.378 with yeah know low end there and the uh five hundred kilogram range and a high end in the nine 00:06:51.378,00:06:55.682 hundred kilogram range and that's uh that's kind of that and then on the left you kind of 00:06:55.682,00:07:00.954 see this graph of uh you know the stock pile of the world over time. In the US and USSR were 00:07:00.954,00:07:05.792 essentially engaged in uh kind of deadlock race to try and get the most nuclear weapons up 00:07:05.792,00:07:09.262 until there was a change in strategy that I'll get to in a second and then that kind of 00:07:09.262,00:07:14.034 came down and then over time you had these other countries emerging and uh and also joining 00:07:14.034,00:07:18.938 the nuclear club. So here are three people who I think were really central to kind of that 00:07:18.938,00:07:24.010 graph we saw previously. The uh the first one is John von Neumann and the really 00:07:24.010,00:07:29.015 interesting thing that he did is he came up with what was called mutually assured destruction 00:07:29.015,00:07:31.851 which was sort of the idea that as long as you've got two super powers that are perpetually 00:07:31.851,00:07:37.290 locked in a uh you know a cold war essentially that they will never nuke each other because 00:07:37.290,00:07:42.696 they're afraid of getting blown up by the other. And uh he kind of said you know the only way 00:07:42.696,00:07:46.700 you can keep a a strategy like that going is you have to have a massive response of being able 00:07:46.700,00:07:52.138 to obliterate the other side no limited response of just you know tit for tat uh and that was 00:07:52.138,00:07:57.410 a a bit of a interesting strategy at the time fortunately nuclear war obviously never 00:07:57.410,00:08:02.415 happened but one of the guys who was really uh instrumental in changing that strategy and I'd 00:08:02.415,00:08:07.420 say led to a lot of those stockpile eruptions over time was Herman Kahn and he argued uh 00:08:07.420,00:08:11.291 rather controversially in his book on thermonuclear war which was rather famously parodied by 00:08:11.291,00:08:15.462 Stanley Kubrick's as Dr. Strangelove uh the concept of winability which is 00:08:15.462,00:08:20.233 controversial though I wouldn't say he looked as much of that as uh as really you know how you 00:08:20.233,00:08:24.971 can make it a little more survivable uh and what he essentially concluded and he 00:08:24.971,00:08:28.641 quite controversial was an extensive fortification anti ballistic missile and related 00:08:28.641,00:08:34.848 and defense technologies uh were not the only way of looking at a massive retaliatory response or 00:08:34.848,00:08:39.052 as he called it a 'wargasm' you could uh end up having a tremendous amount of over 00:08:39.052,00:08:42.856 targeting where mass gallons of you know pointing a dozen warheads at a hot dog stand at 00:08:42.856,00:08:48.728 the pentagon or vice versa. Uh but his thinking was certainly heard in Moscow too they 00:08:48.728,00:08:53.299 excavated M2 a second clandestine subway for uh soviet leadership, Kennedy also looked 00:08:53.299,00:08:58.438 at uh a bunker at one point too but that was never built under Washington um and then the third 00:08:58.438,00:09:03.943 guy on the right there is quite interesting uh Abdul Qadeer Khan and he was essentially the first 00:09:03.943,00:09:08.114 state agnostic uh proliferator of nuclear technology and he pretty much just spread it 00:09:08.114,00:09:11.885 around everywhere- I won't get into too much but he uh was called the father of Pakistan's 00:09:11.885,00:09:16.322 nuclear program but he really proliferated to a lot of other countries including North Korea, 00:09:16.322,00:09:21.661 Iran and he he originally worked for Uranko in the Netherlands and he developed a non proved 00:09:21.661,00:09:27.167 version of uh Centrifuge to separate out uranium and then he just went and dealt it 00:09:27.167,00:09:33.907 essentially to the highest bidder [chuckle] uh so let's move on again uh yes so one of 00:09:33.907,00:09:37.644 the big things- my slides are a little off of work here [chuckle] uh but one of the big 00:09:37.644,00:09:42.582 things really with reexamining this threat model uh is not necessarily looking at mu- as 00:09:42.582,00:09:49.389 much as a uh full out nuclear wars perhaps um maybe an EMP uh EMP event and that is something 00:09:49.389,00:09:54.194 that was learned to a large degree during US testing ah back in 50s and 60s there was the uh 00:09:54.194,00:09:59.399 the starprish- starfish prime shot which took out about uh a third of the satellites uh 00:09:59.399,00:10:04.404 orbiting the planet at the time and this was uh you know well up into the exosphere this is not a 00:10:04.404,00:10:10.210 detonation down near the ground and uh what it does essentially is it ionizes the plasma in the 00:10:10.210,00:10:15.348 upper atmosphere, ionizes the gas in the upper atmosphere into plasma and uh that leads to a 00:10:15.348,00:10:20.720 compton current where a very large amount of electrons are all coming downward and then you 00:10:20.720,00:10:25.558 have relatively broadband radiation down from the very low frequency ELF side all the way 00:10:25.558,00:10:30.997 up to uh you know a mid range microwave if you up to a few gigahertz uh all projected by 00:10:30.997,00:10:36.135 the CNP of course this would be a quite catastrophic potentially to electronics if you see a map 00:10:36.135,00:10:41.574 here of just a an EMP over South Dakota you know a few hundred miles up you can have voltage 00:10:41.574,00:10:46.079 strengths of you know five thousand to fifty thousand volts per meter in some of these bands 00:10:46.079,00:10:50.984 you know the red one there is fifty thousand the uh kind of turquoise ish is is more of five 00:10:50.984,00:10:55.688 thousand and uh you know obviously you need schuling for that so this is something that 00:10:55.688,00:11:00.360 US government and military has been pretty proactive about ever since the starfish prime test 00:11:00.360,00:11:06.266 but the civilian sectors really been lagging behind and uh oh my goodness I'm running out of time 00:11:06.266,00:11:12.405 already let me run into this much longer uh I guess the [inaudible] are out anyways 00:11:12.405,00:11:17.544 [chuckle] uh so when you think about a uh this proportionate risk for high altitude for EMP 00:11:17.544,00:11:22.815 uh you really think of maybe a non state actor more even than necessarily a state wanting to 00:11:22.815,00:11:26.619 do something like this I mean it would be a tremendously devastating attack from an 00:11:26.619,00:11:33.493 economic perspective- I'm waiting for a hook any minute by the way uh but uh oh dear uh 00:11:33.493,00:11:38.398 yeah in terms of a hypothetical day to day life post EMP really the industries would be hardest 00:11:38.398,00:11:43.136 hit is anything that relies on a just in time supply chain so in terms of goods and services, 00:11:43.136,00:11:47.607 anything uh could be uh very homogenous you know availability from area to area uh most 00:11:47.607,00:11:54.314 internet backend providers are pretty EMP hard in this day and age and some of them uh can be a 00:11:54.314,00:11:59.686 little more forward thinking even in commercial data centers uh of course uh a lot of devices 00:11:59.686,00:12:04.891 would survive that are just very small because there is a uh kind of upper limit on the 00:12:04.891,00:12:08.861 frequencies that this EMP puts out and as I said that's the gigahurtz so if you have a small 00:12:08.861,00:12:13.099 enough device that doesn't really behave like an antennae anymore and if it's not plugged 00:12:13.099,00:12:18.271 into you know a large power line which is maybe resonating at say uh you know somewhere extremely 00:12:18.271,00:12:23.409 low frequency range and if that device is more likely to survive. Uh then you know you 00:12:23.409,00:12:28.982 might just well we haven't had an EMP attack in over the last half century in which we've 00:12:28.982,00:12:33.486 known about these effects, is it really something to be concerned over? And I'd say some concern's 00:12:33.486,00:12:38.324 reasonable but certainly not panic uh however the interesting thing I'm going to get to if I 00:12:38.324,00:12:44.731 can get this video up here in one second [chuckle] uh is this new uranium uh separation 00:12:44.731,00:12:49.736 technology. It's in the video- videos folder here and uh this uh the CEO of Silex systems 00:12:52.438,00:12:57.443 actually uh explains the uh explains it quite well. If we can hear. Do we have audio? I 00:13:09.989,00:13:14.994 guess we might not have audio here. Oh dear. Okay well I guess we're not getting uh audio on 00:13:18.097,00:13:23.036 our videos for now so we'll just go ahead and skip over but basically this guy says that 00:13:23.036,00:13:29.208 they build this uh great new laser enrichment technology in uh in Australia and this indeed 00:13:29.208,00:13:33.179 uh has been ongoing for the last couple decades, and then surprisingly there is a wild 00:13:33.179,00:13:37.016 proliferation assessment a lot of people have been calling for a proliferation assessment of 00:13:37.016,00:13:41.721 third generation laser isotope separation and one came out it was published by a postdoc at 00:13:41.721,00:13:46.526 princeton named Ryan Snyder and uh he essentially said you know it looks like this is pretty 00:13:46.526,00:13:50.596 sim- carbon dioxide laser technology they've probably started working on carbon 00:13:50.596,00:13:55.735 monoxide laser technology and that the uh possibility exists that such a system could be 00:13:55.735,00:14:00.206 indigenously assembled which is kind of just code for saying this is not a very hard thing to 00:14:00.206,00:14:05.344 build like you could get your hands on uranium in theory and uh enriching it would would 00:14:05.344,00:14:09.382 really no longer be a huge undertaking of nation states making centrifusion spending a 00:14:09.382,00:14:14.854 lot- you know tens of thousands of RPM that's really no longer necessary with uh just gas laser 00:14:14.854,00:14:18.691 technology I mean we're talking relatively simple things you can build out, marks generators 00:14:18.691,00:14:23.362 which are made out of capacitors and spark caps are stalled so it switches and uh and that's 00:14:23.362,00:14:27.900 really kind of you know switching things up because you don't need that huge capital 00:14:27.900,00:14:32.472 investment and a lot of non state actors may be able to indigenously proliferate in the 00:14:32.472,00:14:37.910 future and uh that's why I think we may be looking at kind of a future of arms control failure 00:14:37.910,00:14:42.448 at least from the perspective of being able to stop enrichment because it's difficult to pick 00:14:42.448,00:14:48.621 up somebody making uh laser isotope separation setup versus a medical laser or you know just 00:14:48.621,00:14:53.893 anything that needs a lot of pulse capacitors for example uh so as much as I hate to agree 00:14:53.893,00:14:59.132 with Donald Trump on the issue of nuclear arms control I I think totality of the evidence 00:14:59.132,00:15:03.736 may point to uh being kinda shoot [inaudible] for lack of a better term. Granted there is uh 00:15:03.736,00:15:07.006 great progress elsewhere in our arms control like the Newsford experiment for remotely 00:15:07.006,00:15:12.912 detecting uh isotope signatures operating nuclear reactors um most arms control has really 00:15:12.912,00:15:18.084 been more around policy of restricting enrichment but again that's really going to be a lot 00:15:18.084,00:15:24.423 harder with uh with this Silex process being reverse engineered now. In terms of locating a 00:15:24.423,00:15:29.462 clandestine proliferation facility uh turns out you only need about seventy two hundred 00:15:29.462,00:15:35.067 kilograms of uh uranium ore in order to proliferate and the facility might fit within about 00:15:35.067,00:15:38.871 two hundred square meters so this this could be very challenging there really haven't 00:15:38.871,00:15:43.576 been too many good intelligent solutions out there yet for this Uh in addition to the 00:15:43.576,00:15:47.713 comparatively low upfront capital expenditures the ability to indigenously assemble laser 00:15:47.713,00:15:51.184 enrichment facilities really presents a significant operational security advantage 00:15:51.184,00:15:56.222 for a proliferator versus uh a say probing an existing supply chain to find an X to AQ con 00:15:56.222,00:16:01.360 because you'll need centrifuges. Uh in terms of building a realistic future of threat model 00:16:01.360,00:16:05.198 for a potential asymmetric nuclear reactors I think stepping back into the annuls of 00:16:05.198,00:16:09.202 civilian misadventure with energetic materials is really warranted, I mean you can say 00:16:09.202,00:16:13.439 for every you know Timothy McVader ten thousand Jason Pierre-Paul's who blow their 00:16:13.439,00:16:18.077 finger off with fireworks [chuckle] for lack of a better analogy and I think you probably 00:16:18.077,00:16:23.149 see a lot of similar things if there's uh indeed a a surge in nuclear proliferation in the 00:16:23.149,00:16:26.853 future you may see a lot of accidents by would be proliferators before you see 00:16:26.853,00:16:31.858 anything that actually uh know comes to fruition uh you know in the moral words of Boris Baranov 00:16:34.160,00:16:39.498 you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs pooksy [laugh] so really in terms of 00:16:39.498,00:16:44.203 what to do with it you know like I said I think the high altitude EMP uh is really the you know 00:16:44.203,00:16:49.075 kind of the most likely threat model given the really disproportionate uh kind of 00:16:49.075,00:16:54.513 effect it can have on a whole society versus you know maybe you can affect a few square 00:16:54.513,00:17:00.653 miles with a ground detonation, you can affect a country with a, a high altitude EMP, uh and 00:17:00.653,00:17:04.423 believe it or not shielding is actually not that difficult you know you look at like a picture 00:17:04.423,00:17:08.728 of the Cheyenne mountain complex well that was designed to survive a five megaton direct 00:17:08.728,00:17:13.399 strike uh granted it's even deprecated now 'cause there are precise enough missiles to hit 00:17:13.399,00:17:17.803 it over and over and over again are held by nation states but when you think about just kind 00:17:17.803,00:17:22.575 of a pop shot coming in and you know exploding at a high altitude believe it or not 00:17:22.575,00:17:27.213 something like a trashcan can give you you know forty or fifty decibels of shielding if you 00:17:27.213,00:17:31.651 tape it up properly so it doesn't act as a slot antennae and let alone you know steel 00:17:31.651,00:17:35.788 culverts, drainage pipes, uh there are really a tremendous amount of options as far as 00:17:35.788,00:17:39.325 shielding goes the important thing is just the inside of the shielding it has to be non 00:17:39.325,00:17:44.330 electrically conductive whereas the shielding itself has to be electrically conductive and then 00:17:44.330,00:17:49.201 uh very large devices are going to also need magnetic shielding in addition to just conductive 00:17:49.201,00:17:54.473 electric shielding. So I decided to look at you know some different options for this and 00:17:54.473,00:18:00.479 uh you know you can obviously go small like trash can or whatever or go ahead and actually you 00:18:00.479,00:18:06.385 know purpose build a hardening facility and that's where I looked at uh Mil STD 188 1251 00:18:06.385,00:18:10.690 high altitude magnetic pulse protection- oh we got time? >>We're done >>Okay, shoot 00:18:13.192,00:18:17.029 >>Okay, Thank you! [Applause] >>Okay thanks a lot [laughs]