[bee_rider]

> This is the kind of thing that I think people assume the government labs might do, but in my experience, is pretty unusual and pretty unlikely. In general, you have to remember that the national laboratories are pretty, well, boring, when it comes to classified information. They want to be boring in this respect. They are not doing cloak-and-dagger stuff on the regular. They’re scientists and engineers for the most part. These are not James Bond-wannabes.

The Sandia folks may be extra special, it is a pretty famous place. But engineers are people first of course, so lots of variation. And also, some are super serious of course, but there are hacker tendencies, playful tendencies. I bet if some intelligence agency folks wanted to, they could find some engineers out there who’d be receptive to this sort of thing.

If it is a fake, known-stupid design, including it would be a funny prank that wastes the time of people that might want to nuke us, right?

[csours]

I visited Los Alamos earlier this year and talked to a retired materials scientist at the visitor center. He said that we have lots of books about the science and scientists that worked on the bomb during WWII, but very little mention of the engineering or engineers - and that's largely because it's extremely classified. The scientists can talk about most of their work because it's too broad to give any real aid to the enemy, but the engineers can't because they could REALLY speed up someone else's weapons program.

[writeslowly]

Somebody (probably a programmer or engineer) took the time to create all of that rad 3D word art, multicolored pie-chart, and the mountain logo, it's not hard to imagine they'd also throw in an eye-catching fake nuclear warhead for fun.

[zubiaur]

Extremely boring, bureaucratic and inefficient. With a few exceptions, I guess they are a way to have Phds on retainer.