Odd Intellipedia caption re: Teller-Ulam design
The Black Vault has a FOIA'd copy of an Intellipedia article on the history of nuclear weapons. To make sure there is no confusion about it, this was declassified and released by the NSA, with a few minor redactions relating to the URL it was originally posted at and authorship.
Intellipedia is a fork of Wikipedia that has been edited by people in the US intelligence community. Most of the article is exactly the same as Wikipedia and labeled as unclassified. But they added a classified caption to one of the simple diagrams of the Teller-Ulam design which is very odd.
The diagram itself is just a standard Morland-derived depiction of the primary and secondary components — nothing that interesting or surprising. Like the rest of the article, it comes from Wikipedia. It does not originate with the US government or intelligence community.
But the new caption reads:
> (S) The basics of the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb: a fusion primary creates a massive number of neutrons to use up much more of the fuel in the fusion secondary. The image reverses the primary and secondary. Therefore it is unclassified.
Which is very strange for a lot of obvious reasons. The most generous interpretation of "fusion primary" here is the fusion fuel, and "fusion secondary" is the uranium blanket, but the argument the "image reverses the primary and secondary" is just strange and bizarre.
That particular image was removed from the Wikipedia article for no really obvious reason in in 2011 (by an Israeli IP address, although that could be just an amusing coincidence), which puts an easy date on the latest this particular article was scraped (one could probably refine it better, but I do not care enough to; judging by other differences, I suspect the Intellipedia scrape was done many years earlier, e.g. around 2007). Just skimming it, it does not look like there are any other significant changes that have been made.
The original caption of the image was:
> The basics of the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb: a fission bomb uses radiation to compress and heat a separate section of fusion fuel.
Which is quite different than the altered one.
A few more thoughts:
If the caption really was "Secret" it is hard for me to understand why they would have declassified it here, if they did so deliberately. It is not as if classification guidance on TN weapons changed a lot in the 2000s.
The image itself goes well beyond the "prescribed" depictions of nuclear weapons designs by the DOE (the other images in the document do not) since at least the 1990s, which do not allow depictions of internal components of the secondary (like a sparkplug). E.g. see the diagrams here, particularly Figure 13.9, to see what they are allowed to show per TCG-NAS-2. So it is odd that they "passed it on" at all, and said that because of its "error" it is unclassified.
Something being in error does not make it unclassified. I thought I had written a blog post about this years ago but I am not finding it, so maybe not. But official DOE policy is that even an erroneous description of an H-bomb can still be classified in many contexts, because they don't want to draw attention to it or narrow down the possibilities in any way. So the logic of the caption is very strange from a classification standpoint, as I understand it.
The only other change from Wikipedia's original appears to be some sentences added to the discussions of Israel, South Africa, and North Korea. But the fact that they've released them later seems very odd, given that I doubt classified guidance on those things has changed.
Anyway, I thought this was all mildly interesting. I am quite curious why someone with classification authority would have rewritten the text in such a confused way. The answer is almost certainly "whomever made these edits did not know what they were talking about and did not know DOE classification regulations," as Intellipedia was capable of being edited by a wide range of people with clearances, and was probably not that high of a priority for anyone.