Fogbank (stylized as FOGBANK) is a code name given to a secret material used in the W76, W78 and W88 nuclear warheads that are part of the United States nuclear arsenal. The process to create Fogbank was lost by 2000, when it was needed for the refurbishment of old warheads. Fogbank was then reverse engineered by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), over a span of five years, and at the cost of tens of millions of dollars.
Fogbank (stylized as FOGBANK) is a code name given to a secret material used in the W76, W78 and W88 nuclear warheads that are part of the United States nuclear arsenal. The process to create Fogbank was lost by 2000, when it was needed for the refurbishment of old warheads. Fogbank was then reverse engineered by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), over a span of five years, and at the cost of tens of millions of dollars.
Fogbank's precise nature is classified; in the words of former Oak Ridge National Laboratory general manager Dennis Ruddy, "The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified." However, NNSA Administrator Tom D'Agostino disclosed the role of Fogbank in the weapon: "There's another material in the—it's called interstage material, also known as Fogbank".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).