After the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima during World War II, both the United States and other countries stopped producing and developing gun-type atomic bombs because they were not cost effective, and implosion-type fission bombs were much better.

So Everyone seems to have forgotten about it.”

Belarus has begun nuclear weapons drills together with Russia "to improve the readiness of the armed forces to use modern means of destruction, including special ammunition," the country’s Defense Ministry announced on May 18.

The exercises have added significance as they come amid growing warnings from Kyiv that Russia is trying to draw Belarus deeper into its war against Ukraine, while also expanding military infrastructure that could support future Russian operations against Ukraine or NATO's eastern flank.

The ministry said a key feature of the drills will be testing the military's ability to conduct combat operations from "unplanned" locations across the country.

Ukraine's Foreign Ministry condemned the exercises, calling Russia-Belarus nuclear cooperation "an unprecedented challenge to the global security architecture," adding the drills violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by involving a non-nuclear state in preparations linked to nuclear weapons use.

"Turning Belarus into its nuclear bridgehead near NATO borders, the Kremlin is effectively legitimizing the spread of nuclear weapons globally and creating a dangerous precedent for other authoritarian regimes," the statement reads.

Russia and Belarus have expanded nuclear cooperation since 2023, when Moscow announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. The two countries held joint nuclear drills in 2024, while Russia reportedly delivered its nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile system to Belarus in 2025.

Photo: Ramil Sitdikov / POOL / AFP / Getty Images.

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.

Via Atomic Test Channel, about 22 minutes long, some nice B57 pr0n and loads of 70s era nuclear procedures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I_HZcxBHcM

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RS-28 Sarmat appears to have undergone a successful test on Tuesday, May 12, 2026. The new footage of the test shows that the missile’s first and second stages are now grey instead of the white appearance seen a few years ago.

Los Alamos has re-scanned these photos of Thin Man test ballistic casings. I've seen really grainy versions over the years so it is nice to see these much more crisp ones. I thought others might find them interesting. You can see early Fat Man ballistic shapes in the background as well.

Thin Man was the plutonium gun-type design. It was abandoned in 1944 after the discovery that reactor-made plutonium was contaminated by Pu-240 and would cause such a weapon to pre-detonate. The gun-type design was retained for use with enriched uranium (shortened and thus designated Little Boy), while the use of plutonium would require developing implosion fully.

I don't know exactly when these photos were taken. Presumably one could triangulate it based on when ballistic testing was done on them, but I haven't tried to run it down. Los Alamos lists these in their Wendover file, but John Coster-Mullen says they were at Muroc. Again, presumably one could figure this out, I just have not taken the time to, yet. If someone else wants to give it a whack, by all means, I would be grateful...

This test took place near Yasny ,Orenburg region, the site of last year's accident, should using a Dnepr rocket silo (in Yasny, Dnepr rocket only used two silos).

Sarmat's first-stage tank appears to be longer, while the second-stage tank is smaller (considering the angle, the difference is still significant).

The layout of the Sarmat's interstage and second-stage may differ from the R-36Ms (a new second-stage engine was used? The sarmat's interstage has no openings, while R-36Ms normally has four openings.).

The fuel tank manufacturing process is different (refer to R-36M2 in Ukraine rocket museum and "combat approved" TV show ).

Sarmat has FOBS capability (hello ,R-36orb).

A new gray coating was used, but the fairing was not coated with this layer (the fairings of Russia's current Topol-M series and Sarmat seem to lack this coating You can see a texture similar to carbon fiber).

The command center footage used by TASS is likely from a training facility in RVSN's Military Academy.