The World Is Getting Scarier By The Minute

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

So, Instapundit sends me to this tweet about “4th Generation Nuclear Weapons.”  In it the Under Secretary of State testifies to Congress that China is conducting nuclear testing, which is bad enough.  But what in the world is a “4th Generation Nuclear Weapon?” (“FGNW” in government acronym speak.)  So digging I went, and what I learned is not happy.

The best summary I could find is this presentation from 2009 given at the Naval Academy by an analyst from government contractor SAIC.  (SAIC is a former client of mine – full disclosure.  Though not in this particular area of their activity.)  In a nutshell, FGNW’s are fusion based weapons (like a hydrogen bomb) that give relativity low yields (unlike H-bombs, <100 tons TNT) and do not require a fission based (enriched uranium or plutonium) trigger.  This is a big deal because most of our strategy to control nuclear proliferation is based around controlling the flow of uranium and plutonium.

The really scary part is China is using technology to mask its testing from seismic monitoring, so we are not sure exactly what is going on.  For the uninformed, nuke testing creates earthquakes of a sort, readily detectable by the seismic networks we have set up to monitor earth movement around volcanos and in quake-prone places like California.  The military monitors such data from agencies like the USGS as well as having seismic networks of its own attuned to nuke testing, both as a means of intelligence gathering.  So not only are the Chinese developing nukes which have no proliferation safeguards, they are purposefully hampering our intelligence gathering capabilities as they do so.

They are up to no good, quite serious no good.

The SAIC presentation, now more than 15 years old, looks oh-so-briefly (last slide) at the ramifications of such tech and the difficulties of controlling its proliferation.  Here’s the one that scares me most, “Without the need for a fission trigger, FGNW could produce very little fallout radiation while utilizing an extremely compact configuration.”  In other words, several hundred tons of TNT in a gym bag, and unlike currently contemplated suitcase nukes, without the radiation signature we typically rely on to find it before it is too late.  Not a pretty picture.

In the hands of a nation-state like China such devices are scary enough.  But imagine them in the hands of an Al Qaeda or Hamas.  And if you are China, would you rather not use such devices to sow chaos around the world, or maybe just in Taiwan, before you stepped in to take over?

This is a seriously destabilizing development.  I trust that because these devices are not subject to the non-proliferation treaties we are also developing them – and if we are not, I hope we get busy real soon.  But an arms race is not really the answer here, nor is Mutually Assured Destruction – primarily because these devices could be so easily deployed by third parties we would not know who to destroy.

Fortunately, there are people smarter than me – I hope they are working on this problem.