Audio's good?
Okay, so I'm Three Alarm Lamp Scooter, and today I'm giving a talk on DIY Nukeproofing.
So show of hands real quick, anyone here try to come to this talk last year?
Anyone?
Anyone?
We got a few, okay.
Anyone spotted as a Fed in the Spot the Fed panel that replaced this talk last year?
Okay, I guess no one's that brave.
So anyways, got a little background radiation, I guess you'd say, as far as motivations
for this.
I originally submitted this talk to CFP with some outstanding questions as to what exactly
I could and couldn't discuss.
There was actually some information in this talk that was previously classified, but
it's since been published in an open access journal.
And I couldn't deliver that content last year as it had not yet been published, and now
I'm not afraid of ending up in Git mode to discuss it.
That info specifically is third generation laser isotope separation technology.
In addition to that, unfortunately, there was some tritium illicitly imported for a
security black badges last year, and also I was warned, you know, don't get caught up
in that.
So I guess that's a little bit of our background.
I'm really trying to keep this fast because we've only got like 10 minutes or whatever.
Anyways, so we're just going to talk about physics a little bit as we move into DIY
new proofing.
There's kind of more fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding nuclear weapons than perhaps
any other technology out there, especially their hypothetical capabilities in electronic
warfare.
Of course, DEFCON is a computer security conference and nuclear weapons have fortunately for the
most part not done much physical damage in the last seven decades outside of some Cold
War accidents.
However, DEFCON did originally stand for Defense Condition, and I think it's a valuable
forum to look at how the confluence of factors and technologies are causing what I euphemistically
refer to as a changing threat landscape on the nuclear side.
So to really grok the gestalt of nuclear weapons and the threat landscape that has
been there in the past, we kind of have to go back to the past.
I'm going to give you a little quick remedial physics lesson.
You've got two different main isotopes of uranium, uranium-230.
Okay, let me try and speak up a little bit more.
So we're going to have like a 90-second remedial physics lesson here, if my microphone can
work properly.
We've got two different isotopes of uranium that are kind of important to all this.
One of them is uranium-235, the other is uranium-238.
They differ by three neutrons, and that is why they have different mass.
And kind of the real short version of this, I had a lot more prepared.
But you can use what's called the kinetic isotope effect to separate the lighter from
the heavier uranium.
And the lighter uranium-235 actually is what's called fissile material.
If you hit it with a neutron, it can sustain a nuclear reaction if it's enriched above
around 5% usually, unless it's a pressurized light water reactor.
Anyways, the heavier uranium isotope is much more stable, has about a 4.5 billion year
half-life, whereas the lighter uranium isotope is about 700 million years.
And if you manage to get about a 5.5 billion year half-life, you can get about a 5.5 billion
year half-life.
And if you have a 57-kilogram ball of this lighter isotope separated out of the heavy
stuff that's naturally occurring, 99.7 or, sorry, 99.3% of natural uranium, you can
actually make a physics package, as they euphemistically call nuclear weapons, with,
again, about 57 kilograms as a minimum for the 235 content.
Interestingly, uranium-238 is also not just an inert filler.
You can actually hit it with a neutron, and it will undergo transmutation to plutonium-235.
You can actually hit it with a neutron, and it will undergo transmutation to plutonium-239,
which is also fissile material, actually has about a 10-kilogram critical mass.
That translates to about the size of a baseball.
But you need a nuclear reactor that's running to do that, so that is a very difficult thing
for anything but really a nation-state actor to do, whereas, as I'll get to, this U-235
route to a physics package is becoming more practical for a potential proliferator.
So moving on a little bit more, we kind of had the original proliferation was really
the United States.
The United States and the Manhattan Project, back around World War II, and I really, again,
won't touch on too much here.
I'll just try and go with the very basics.
But kind of the one on the device on the right there was called Fat Man.
That was a plutonium implosion-style device.
Again, you need a nuclear reactor to build that.
Pretty difficult to come up with the plutonium.
You also need explosive lensing, because plutonium is naturally liable to kind of go
off ahead of time, whereas uranium isn't.
You need to slam several pieces of the plutonium together at very high speed, and that's also
something that's non-trivial with explosives engineering.
The one on the left, Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima versus Fat Man, was dropped
on Nagasaki.
The one on the left is much, much easier to build, again, as I'll get to, because it's
third generation when there's a rice-cook separation.
So moving on again real quick, and I'm skipping over so much content that I wanted to get
into.
Essentially, the USSR, you know, Soviet Russia at the time, ripped off the U.S.'s design.
They had a spy named Klaus Fuchs in the Manhattan Project.
He turned over a lot of diagrams.
You know, information on the U.S.'s R&D in the Manhattan Project over to the Rosenbergs,
who were subsequently electrocuted for their spying by the U.S.
And then the USSR made RDS-1, or Stalin's jet engine, and that kind of really got the
Cold War into overdrive, you could say.
So anyways, moving on from there, there was, of course, further R&D in nuclear weapons,
and this is honestly not super-duper relevant to the presentation either.
There were what were called Teller-Ulam devices, which is where you have a nuclear fusion
reaction going on near a fission reaction.
And again, that actually requires a hydrogen isotope called tritium.
It's quite rare, and there have not been any big breakthroughs recently in producing
or separating tritium out from regular hydrogen.
So that's, again, not super-duper relevant other than, you know, the largest fireworks
out there, essentially.
Tsar Bomba was, I believe, over a 50-megaton detonation at the USSR.
So moving on again.
There were a lot of other countries that, you know, proliferated, and there was the
U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, et cetera.
I kind of called them all the nuclear also-rans.
Most of them didn't do anything too necessarily innovative.
But one of the big exceptions to that, which was interesting from a strategy perspective,
and I'll get into strategy again in a second, is Israel.
And they've officially maintained nuclear ambiguity.
Supposedly, they might have set off a nuke in 1979 called the Vela Incident somewhere
in the, you know, exact sea-slip.
But anyways, the Vela Incident in 1979 was supposedly a test of theirs, but they don't
confirm or deny that they have nuclear weapons.
So all outside sources have that kind of graph on the right there as a probability distribution
of how much plutonium they likely have with, you know, a low end there and a 500-kilogram
range and a high end in the 900-kilogram range.
And that's kind of that.
And then on the left, you kind of see this graph of, you know, the stockpile of the world
over time.
And the U.S. and the USSR were essentially engaged in a kind of deadlock race to try
and get the most nuclear weapons up until there was a change in strategy that I'll get
to in a second.
And then that kind of came down.
And then over time, you had these other countries emerging and also joining the nuclear club.
So here are three people who I think were really central to kind of that graph we saw
previously.
The first one is John Monnoy.
And the really interesting thing that he did is he came up with what was called mutually
assured destruction, which was sort of the idea that as long as you've got two superpowers
that are perpetually locked in the, you know, a cold war, essentially, that they will never
nuke each other because they're afraid of getting blown up by the other.
And he kind of said, you know, the only way you can keep a strategy like that going is
you have to have a massive response of being able to obliterate the other side, no limited
response of just, you know, tit for tat.
And that was a bit of an interesting strategy at the time.
Fortunately, nuclear war obviously never happened.
But one of the guys who was really instrumental in changing that strategy and I'd say led
to a lot of those stockpile reductions over time was Herman Kahn.
And he argued rather controversially in his book on thermonuclear war, which was rather
famously parodied by Stanley Kubrick as Dr. Strangelove, the concept of winnability, which
is controversial, but I wouldn't say he looked as much at that as really, you know, how you
can make it a little more survivable.
And what he essentially concluded, and quite controversially, was that extensive fortification,
anti-ballistic missile, and related defense technologies were not the only way of looking
at a massive retaliatory response, or as he called it, a wargasm.
You could end up having a tremendous amount of over-targeting, where Moscow ends up,
you know, pointing a dozen warheads at a hot dog stand at the Pentagon, or vice versa.
But his thinking was certainly heard in Moscow, too.
They excavated M2.
A second clandestine subway for Soviet leadership.
Kennedy also looked at a bunker at 1.2, but that was never built under Washington.
And then the third guy on the right there is quite interesting.
Abdul Qadir Khan.
And he was essentially the first state agnostic proliferator of nuclear technology.
And he pretty much just spread it around everywhere.
I won't get into too much, but he was called the father of Pakistan's nuclear program,
but he really proliferated to a lot of other countries, including North Korea and Iran.
And he originally worked for URANCO in the Netherlands,
and he developed an improved version of centrifuge to separate out uranium.
And then he just went and dealt it, essentially, to the highest bidder.
So let's move on again.
Yeah, so one of the big things...
My slide's a little out of order here.
But one of the big things, really, with reexamining this threat model
is not necessarily looking at as much as a full-out nuclear war as perhaps maybe an EMP,
EMP event.
And that is something that was learned to a large degree during U.S. testing back in the 50s and 60s.
There was the Starfish Prime shot,
which took out about a third of the satellites orbiting the planet at the time.
And this was, you know, well up into the exosphere.
This is not a detonation down near the ground.
And what it does, essentially, is it ionizes the plasma in the upper atmosphere,
ionizes the gas in the upper atmosphere into plasma,
and that leads to a Compton current.
Where a very large amount of electrons are all coming downward,
and then you have relatively broadband radiation down from the very low-frequency ELF side
all the way up to mid-range microwave, up to a few gigahertz,
all projected by this EMP.
And, of course, this would be quite catastrophic, potentially, to electronics.
If you see a map here of just an EMP over South Dakota, you know, a few hundred miles up,
you can have voltage strengths of, you know, 5,000 to 50,000 volts per meter in some of these bands.
You know, the red one there is 50,000.
The kind of turquoise-ish is more 5,000.
And, you know, obviously, you need shielding for that.
So this is something that the U.S. government and military has been pretty proactive about
ever since the starfish prime test.
But the civilian sector has really been lagging behind.
And, oh my goodness, I'm running out of time already.
Let me run into this much longer.
I guess there are my greens around.
Anyways.
So, when you think about a, uh,
disproportionate risk for high-altitude EMP,
uh, you really think of maybe a non-state actor more even than necessarily a state wanting to do something like this.
I mean, it would be a tremendously devastating attack from an economic perspective.
I'm waiting for a hook any minute, by the way.
Uh, but, uh,
uh, yeah.
In terms of a hypothetical day-to-day light post-EMP,
really the industries would be hardest hit is anything that relies on a just-in-time supply chain.
So in terms of goods and services, anything, uh,
could be very commodinous, you know,
availability from area to area.
Uh, most internet backbone providers are pretty EMP-hard in this day and age.
And some of them, uh,
can be a little more forward-thinking even in commercial data centers.
Uh, of course,
a lot of devices would survive that are just very small
because there is a, uh, kind of upper limit on the frequencies that this EMP puts out.
And as I said, that's a few gigahertz.
So if you have a small enough device, it doesn't really behave like an antenna anymore.
And if it's not plugged into, you know,
a large power line, which is going to be resonating at, say, uh,
you know, somewhere in extremely low frequency range,
then that device is more likely to survive.
Uh, then, you know, you might just say,
well, we haven't had an EMP attack in over the last half century
in which we've known about these effects.
Is it really something to be concerned over?
And I'd say some concern is reasonable, but certainly not panic.
Uh, however, the interesting thing I'm going to get to,
if I can get this video up here in one second,
uh, is this new uranium.
Uh, separation technology.
It's in the video, videos folder here.
And, uh, this, uh, the CEO of Silex Systems actually,
uh, explains the, uh, explains it quite well.
We can hear.
Do we have audio?
I guess we might not have audio here.
Oh, dear.
Okay.
Well, I guess we're not getting, uh, audio on our videos for now.
So, we'll just go ahead and skip over.
But basically, this guy says that they've developed this, uh,
great new laser enrichment technology in, uh, in Australia.
And this, indeed, uh, has been ongoing for the last couple decades.
And then, surprisingly, there is a wild proliferation assessment.
A lot of people have been calling for a proliferation assessment
of third-generation laser isotope separation.
And one came out.
It was published by a, uh, postdoc at Princeton named Ryan Snyder.
And, uh, he essentially said, you know,
it looks like this is previously carbon dioxide laser technology.
They've probably started working on carbon monoxide laser technology.
And that the, uh, possibility exists that such a system could be
indigenously assembled, which is kind of just code for saying
this is not a very hard thing to build.
Like, you could get your hands on uranium, in theory, and, uh,
enriching it would, would really no longer be a huge undertaking
of nation states making centrifuges spinning them up at, you know,
tens of thousands of RPM.
That's really no longer necessary with, uh, just gas laser technology.
I mean, we're talking relatively simple things you can build out of
Marks generators, which are made out of capacitors and spark caps
or solid state switches.
And, uh, and that's really kind of, you know, switching things up
because you don't need that huge capital investment.
A lot of non-state actors may be able to indigenously proliferate in the future.
And, uh, that's why I think we may be looking at kind of a future
of arms control failure, at least from the perspective of being able
to stop enrichment because it's difficult to pick up somebody
making a laser isotope separation setup versus a medical laser
or, you know, just anything that needs a lot of pulse capacitors, for example.
Uh, so as much as I hate to agree with Donald Trump on the issue
of nuclear arms control, I think the totality of the evidence may point
to, uh, being kind of, for lack of a better term.
Granted, there is, uh, great progress elsewhere in arms control,
like the Nucifer experiment for remotely detecting isotope signatures
operating in nuclear reactors.
Um, most arms control has really been more around policy of restricting enrichment,
but, again, that's really going to be a lot harder with, uh,
with this Silex process being reverse engineered now.
In terms of locating a clandestine proliferation facility, uh,
it turns out you only need about 7,200 kilograms of, uh, uranium ore
in order to proliferate, and the facility might fit in about 200 square meters.
So this, this could be very challenging if there really haven't been
too many good intelligence solutions out there yet for this.
Uh, in addition to the comparatively low upfront capital expenditures,
the ability to indigenously assemble laser enrichment facilities
really presents a significant operational security advantage
for the proliferator versus, uh, say, probing an existing supply chain
to find the next A.Q. Khan, who's, you know, yielding centrifuges.
Uh, in terms of building a realistic future threat model
for, uh, potential asymmetric nuclear reactors,
I think stepping back into the annals of civilian misadventure
with energetic materials is really warranted.
I mean, you can say for every, you know, Timothy McVeigh
there are 10,000 Jason Pierpauls who blow their finger off with fireworks.
For lack of a better analogy.
And I think you'd probably see a lot of similar things
if there's, uh, indeed a surge in nuclear proliferation in the near future.
You may see a lot of accidents by would-be proliferators
before you see anything that actually, uh, you know, comes to fruition.
Uh, you know, in the immortal words of Boris Badanov,
you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, poopsie.
So really in terms of what to do about it, you know, like I said,
I think the high-altitude EMP, uh, is really the, you know,
kind of the most likely threat model given the really disproportionate,
uh, kind of effect it can have on a whole society versus, you know,
maybe you can affect a few square miles with a ground detonation.
You can affect a country with a high-altitude EMP.
Uh, and believe it or not, shielding is actually not that difficult.
You know, you look at, like, a picture of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.
Well, that was designed to survive a fire.
It's a five-megaton direct strike.
Uh, granted, it's even deprecated now,
because there are precise enough missiles to hit it over and over and over again
that are held by nation states.
But when you think about just kind of a pot shot coming in and, you know,
exploding at a high altitude, believe it or not,
something like a trash can can give you, you know,
40 or 50 decibels of shielding if you tape it up properly
so it doesn't act as a slot antenna.
And let alone, you know, steel culverts, drainage pipes.
Uh, there are really a tremendous amount of options as far as shielding goes.
The important thing is just the inside of it.
The inside of the shielding has to be non-electrically conductive,
whereas the shielding itself has to be electrically conductive.
And then, uh, very large devices are going to also need magnetic shielding
in addition to just conductive electric shielding.
So I decided to look at, you know, some different options for this.
And, uh, you know, you can obviously go small, like a trash can or whatever,
or go ahead and actually, you know, purpose-build a hardened facility.
And that's where I looked at a MIL-STD-188-125-1
high-altitude electromagnetic pulse protection.
Oh, we got time?
We're done.
Okay, shoot.
Okay.
Thank you!
Okay, thanks a lot.