{"id":8627,"date":"2023-04-17T18:48:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-18T01:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=8627"},"modified":"2023-04-17T14:34:25","modified_gmt":"2023-04-17T21:34:25","slug":"argonne-labs-and-the-hunt-for-red-october","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=8627","title":{"rendered":"Argonne labs and the Hunt for Red October"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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One of my favorite movies was The Hunt for Red October. In it, Sean Connery plays a Soviet sub commander in control of a nearly silent intercontinental ballistic submarine. Its silence comes from a hypothetical magnetohydrodynamic drive that had no propellers. But this was all fiction, wasn’t it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was in high school, our science team took a trip to Fermi lab and Argonne National Laboratories up near Chicago. I was captivated. I still remember the discussion on subatomic particles by the Fermi lab speaker and seeing some of the devices such as the Tevatron<\/a>. I still remember him talking about plans for an even larger collider being planned in Europe (hint, they built it).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Argonne labs, we took another tour. At one point, we went into one of the large warehouse labs and there was a giant circular machine. The guide told us it was, in fact, an experimental magnetohydrodynamic drive<\/a>. He shared some interesting anecdotes about the device. It turns out, the principles were sound<\/a>. By creating a gigantic magnetic field one could indeed introduce thrust from salt-water passed through the center of it. If you want to make one, it is not complex and there are even YouTube videos demonstrating small devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest problem? It wasn’t very fast, and you needed a GIANT magnetic field. It also didn’t work in fresh water and had a variety of other limitations and caveats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Japanese experimented with the technology as well and there were numerous prototypes developed. They also ran into the same problems but it did advance the field a bit by using smaller and more powerful superconducting magnetic systems to introduce the field. It works fairly well on a small scale, but pushing something as large as a transport ship or ballistic missile submarine was untenable. Not much has happened since those days as the physics of the system simply don’t work out – though China recently announced their experiments.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, it was absolutely fascinating to see something that was on movies and hinted at as secret technology in person. I think it was a big part of what got me interested in science and led me to computer science years later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There has also a lot of suggestions that The Hunt for Red October book, publish from a nobody salesman via the Navy Institute Press, contained then-classified secrets, and happened at the same time of several strange submarine incidents was actually a ploy to signal certain messages to the Soviet Union<\/a>. Since Tom Clancy recently died, we may never know for sure. But it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Links:<\/p>\n\n\n\n