On Monday, the Russian military warned the world that Ukraine was in the final stages of creating and detonating a dirty bomb that would spread nuclear radiation across Europe. 

According to Russia, Ukraine and the West would then claim the attack was Russia detonating a nuclear bomb and attack. The allegation is absurd because dirty bombs—an explosive attached to chemical or radioactive material—are theoretical. The explosion would cause more damage than any radioactive material. But Russia’s claims are made more ludicrous by the images it used to sell the theory: stills from a 2018 Syrian propaganda film, a 2014 training exercise about disposing radioactive material, and photos from 9/11. 

Moscow published its message on Telegram and Twitter. It attached a slide presentation and linked back to a long explanation from Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces of the RF Armed Forces.“According to the information we have, two organizations in Ukraine have specific instructions to create the so-called ‘dirty bomb,’” Kirillov said. “The works are at the final stage.”

The most ludicrous part of the Russia MoD’s dirty bomb presentation was the photos it used to make its points. In a slide about chemical weapons, the Russian MoD posted two images meant to represent chemical weapons attacks in Syria. The first, as Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins pointed out on Twitter, is a production still from a movie about the chemical attacks in Syria. It even features someone using a clapperboard.

The movie, Revolution Man, was a Russian-funded propaganda movie meant to blame White Helmets—a volunteer humanitarian organization operating in Syria—for Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Russia previously used images from the movie in 2018 when trying to claim that the White Helmets were doing the chemical attacks. 

“That's 2022 Russian propaganda using stills from a 2018 Syrian anti-White Helmets propaganda film, which Russian media in 2018 used as direct evidence of the White Helmets creating propaganda,” Higgins said on Twitter. The picture is still up on the movie’s Facebook page.

Higgins went over some more photos from the Russian presentation. One still from a slide purporting to explain Ukrain’s ability to build a dirty bomb seems to show radioactive material in the back of the bag with a drawing of a barrel diagram on top of it above the words “Creation of a Dirty Bomb.” The photo is from a 2014 training exercise involving nuclear material. Another photo purporting to show the civilian impact of a dirty bomb is just a picture from 9/11.

A dirty bomb is a theoretical weapon that no one has ever used. It’s been the plot in multiple movies and causes fear and panic in anyone who hears about it. The idea is that an explosive would be placed next to radioactive or chemical material. “When the charge is detonated, the container is destroyed, and the radioactive substance is sprayed by a shock wave, while creating radioactive contamination of the area over large areas,” Kirillov said.

Again, no dirty bomb has ever been detonated, and nobody is sure how it would actually work. But scientists who study this kind of thing have said that the explosion from a dirty bomb would do more damage than any radioactive material inside it.

“Let me emphasize this. The point of a ‘dirty bomb’ is to contaminate an area with radioactive material. People in the area will ingest some of that material and will need medical treatment, but few will ingest enough to produce radiation sickness,” Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist, said on Twitter. “Dispersing material through an explosion is actually difficult. The most effective material for a ‘dirty bomb’ would be some types of hospital irradiation sources, which contain powder.”

Many of the radioactive elements that would make people very sick are heavy and hard to aerosolize, even when part of an explosion. The amount of wind in the detonation area would determine a lot of the scatter pattern and, even then, it would cause more fear than radiation poisoning.

According to Russia’s own presentation, the dirty bomb could contain enriched uranium oxide, uranium-238, uranium-235, or plutonium-239. Russia also gave specific locations where the material would come from. The International Atomic Energy Agency quickly put out a statement after the MoD published its report stating that it hadn’t seen anything weird in any of those locations. 

“The IAEA inspected one of these locations one month ago and all our findings were consistent with Ukraine’s safeguards declarations,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in the statement. “No undeclared nuclear activities or material were found there.” The IAEA has been in and out of Ukraine for the past year, inspecting places like Chernobyl, Ukraine’s power plants, and the contested power plant at Zaporizhzhia.

The Russian MoD’s claim that Ukraine is working on a dirty bomb is the worst kind of propaganda. It’s dumb, scary, and lazy. It uses assets from its past propaganda efforts to tell a story that scares everyone but has no basis in reality.

Russia has finished building its first batch of “nuclear-capable underwater drone” torpedoes nicknamed Poseidon, according to state-owned news agency TASS. According to TASS, Poseidon is meant to be used in Russia’s new nuclear-powered Belgorod submarine. Billed as an unstoppable super torpedo by both Putin and some Western news outlets, the Poseidon is another unknown and unproven Russian weapon.

Poseidon is NATO’s name for Russia’s Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System, a new kind of underwater drone capable of carrying both nuclear and conventional warheads. TASS, citing an anonymous source, said that the new weapon was finished and would soon be delivered to a Russian submarine.

Little is actually known about the mysterious weapon and its capabilities. According to Russian sources and Western intelligence, it’s enormous. It weighs more than 200,000 pounds, has a diameter of around 6 feet, and a length of more than 60 feet. It’s so big that the Belgorod can only carry six of them. This would make it the largest torpedo ever developed and deployed by any country in the world.

The world first caught a glimpse of the Poseidon thanks to a 2015 leak that showed off the weapons the Kremlin planned to deploy with the Belgorod. The giant torpedo seems to be unwieldy, an enormous torpedo that uses a nuclear engine to carry it vast distances. Its size and nuclear signature might make it easy to track, but it would be hard to know until one was fired. It’s also important to note that though this weapon has been billed as capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, there’s no confirmation that the ones that have been produced are carrying one. 

Putin first revealed the torpedoes to the world during a 2018 presentation to the Federal Assembly, Russia’s legislative body. During the speech he announced the development of four new nuclear weapons and demonstrated their use by showing a CGI video of a nuke hitting Mar-a-Lago. Along with the Poseidon, Putin also teased the RS-28 “Satan II” Sarmat intercontinental-ballistic missile (ICBM), the Zircon hypersonic missile, and a nuclear powered cruise missile called the SSC-X-9 Skyfall.

According to the Kremlin, work on these new nuclear weapons has borne fruit. It said it tested a launch of the Satan II in April, 2022. Earlier this month, it announced that it had deployed the Zircon hypersonic missile on a ship that planned to tour the world’s seas.

The Skyfall and Poseidon have remained more mysterious and TASS provided no official confirmation from the Russian Ministry of Defense about the completion of the torpedo’s construction. When the Zircon was shipped out a few weeks ago, both Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced it publicly. Neither have recently mentioned the Poseidon or Skyfall.

Both the Poseidon and Skyfall are said to use nuclear-powered engines to drive them. It’s a weapon idea that the U.S. also attempted to develop in the 1960s but abandoned after increasing concerns about, among other things, radioactive emissions caused by the engine. Unless Russia has developed a new kind of shielding for the Skyfall and Poeisden’s engines, there’s a chance the weapons will spew radioactive material in their wake once fired. This kind of uncontrolled spew was too much of a risk even for the Americans at the height of nuclear development.

In 2019, a nuclear accident at a Russian facility in the Arctic killed 7 people. Moscow claimed the accident was the result of a small nuclear reactor explosion. The evidence, however, indicated that the Kremlin was testing a Skyfall missile and something had gone wrong. Now, it appears a similar weapon, with similar issues, will soon be deployed on a Russian submarine.

Scientists who are working toward the dream of nuclear fusion, a form of power that could potentially provide abundant clean energy in the future, have discovered surprising and unexplained behavior among particles in a government laboratory, reports a new study. The results hint at the mysterious fundamental physics that underlie nuclear fusion reactions, which fuel the Sun and other stars.

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a device at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), recently celebrated the milestone of creating what’s known as a “burning plasma,” which is an energized state of matter that is mostly sustained by “alpha particles” created by fusion reactions. The NIF has also reached the threshold of producing “ignition,” meaning fusion reactions that are self-sustaining, which is a major breakthrough, though it will likely still take decades to develop a fusion reactor—assuming it is possible at all.

Now, a team led by Ed Hartouni, a physicist at LLNL, has revealed that particles inside burning plasmas have unexpectedly high energies that could open new windows into the exotic physics of fusion reactors, which “could be important for achieving robust and reproducible ignition,” according to a study published on Monday in Nature Physics.

“This is a new regime of plasma; NIF diagnostics have made it possible to study these things in ways we couldn't do before,” said Hartouni in a call with Motherboard that also included study authors Alastair Moore, a physicist at LLNL, and Aidan Crilly, a research associate in plasma physics at Imperial College London. “We're able to see things at a level that we hadn't been able to see before, and there are surprises with these plasmas in an actual laboratory.”

“It's a really exciting time for us to finally have an almost-igniting facility and experiments to understand this physics that we haven't really been able to understand before and begin to get to the point where we can think about what a future fusion facility might look like,” added Moore. 

The team discovered the strange behavior of the ions while examining observations from several experiments that have occurred at NIF in recent years. These tests involve fusion between particles called ions, which are atoms that don’t have the same number of positive and negative components (protons and electrons), leaving them with an electric charge. 

Using dozens of lasers to heat deuterium and tritium ions, which are both heavier versions of hydrogen, NIF researchers generate fusion reactions between the ions. In a burning plasma, the reactions between the ions produce new entities, called alpha particles, that drive up higher temperatures that, in turn, spark even more reactions as part of a thermonuclear burn. 

Hartouni and his colleagues have now shown that NIF experiments that produce alpha particles consistently show ions with higher energies than predicted by models, though the source of these energy boosts “is an open experimental question,” according to the study. The team presented four possible explanations for the observation, including so-called “kinetic effects” that have been speculated about in previous theories, but it will take more experiments and meticulous research to understand the underlying mechanisms at work in the plasma.

“It's a mystery, but there's multiple hypotheses,” said Crilly. “Whether it's one on its own, like this kinetic effect, or it's a combination of them and they all add their little bit to that gap.”

“It's worth thinking about how extreme these conditions are and why it's hard,” he added, noting that the NIF fusion reactions occur at temperatures around 180 million degrees Fahrenheit and in conditions that are 30 times more dense than the Sun. Within this otherworldly environment “we need to understand exactly how an alpha particle bumps into all these other particles and distributes its energy and how they all collide,” Crilly noted.

To that end, the team plans to continue searching for clues about the weird ion behavior in both models and experiments. Given that NIF has produced this unprecedented glimpse into the weird world of fusion reactions, the facility is bound to find strange new insights no matter what direction their research takes them.

“We've never been able to study this before,” Moore said. “This is the first burning plasma that we've ever created on the planet, so it's pretty amazing.”

When the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in search of sensitive documents Monday, it was looking for classified information related to nuclear weapons, a source familiar with the investigation told the Washington Post. Trump denied the allegation on Truth Social, calling it a hoax and comparing it to accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The problem is, because of the way nuclear secrecy works in the U.S., it’s possible Trump took something without realizing it was classified. Presidents have done similar things before with regards to nuclear secrets.

I reached out to several nuclear weapons experts, and they all told me the same thing: They had no idea what it was, and the list of possibilities was enormous. The category of “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” is so broad as to be meaningless.

“I've seen other experts speculating it could be anything from the ‘biscuit’ that held the nuclear codes during his presidency (and that would have been changed when Biden assumed office), to information about another country's nuclear program in the form of briefing materials or other documents, to information about design or basing,” Emma Claire Foley, a senior associate in policy and research at Global Zero, a nonprofit that seeks the elimination of nuclear weapons, told me. “As things stand, there's no way of knowing, and there's a huge range of things it might be.”

Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, concurred. “It could be anything,” he said. “That document could contain information that you would find totally unremarkable but still be marked restricted data, known as Q.”

Q Clearance refers to Top-Secret Restricted Data related to America’s nuclear programs. It’s also where the QAnon conspiracy gets its name. “I once gave a talk about Iran’s centrifuge program and the person next to me kept whispering, ‘That’s Q,’ thinking that I was disclosing ‘information related to nuclear weapons,’” he said. “I felt bad when I told her that I didn’t have a clearance but it was nice the government was also aware of the issues that Iran was having with its enrichment program.”

One of the problems with narrowing down what the FBI was looking for is the nature of how the U.S. handles information related to its nuclear program. According to Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and author of the book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the USA, anything related to nukes in the U.S. is classified by default.

According to Wellerstein, the Senate committee drafting the Atomic Energy Act in 1946 got worried about losing the secret of the bomb. 

“The problem is, the same committee did not want to give the federal government the power to classify the entire world of science and technology. They feared too much classification, AND too little classification,” he said on Twitter. “So to square this circle they created a concept called ‘restricted data,’ which was defined as essentially all information about nuclear weapons and nuclear power that had not been removed from that category explicitly.”

Wellerstein also told me he wouldn’t speculate on what Trump could have taken, but he did say it’s not the first time a president has run afoul of the FBI over nuclear secrets. An FBI memo from November 1956 showed the FBI fretting over what to do about former President Harry Truman.

“In August of 1956, during the discussion at the Democratic National Convention regarding the Democratic platform, Truman made the statement that the first atomic bomb contained [redacted] of fissionable material,” an FBI memo said. “[Redacted] advised that this information had been checked thoroughly by the [Atomic Energy Commission] people, and that its present classification is ‘Secret—Restricted Data.’” 

Wellerstein had the whole story. “In November 1956, the FBI became aware that Truman was apparently telling people how much fissile material was in the atomic bomb,” he said. “After the Trinity test, Truman was given a short initial report on it, at Potsdam. According to the people there, he sort of read it out loud as he walked around the room, many times, triumphantly. Throughout his life, you can find him still quoting bits from that report, like he burned it into his memory.”

Wellerstein said one piece of the report that amazed Truman was that the bomb used only 13 and a half pounds of plutonium. “And there's something about that ‘thirteen and a half’ but he wrote it down at Potsdam, and it HAS to be what the FBI report is about,” he said. “Harry Truman was telling people about the atomic bomb and spat out that phrase without probably having the slightest clue it was classified.”

On Twitter, Wellerstein pointed out that the AEC doesn’t contain provisions for a president to declassify Restricted Data. “It’s a different category of law and classification altogether,” he said. “But this is real bleeding-edge of presidential powers and classification law. I have certainly never seen it discussed in the long history of nuclear secrecy in the USA.”

This isn’t the first time people have raised concerns about how Trump handles nuclear secrets. Allegations of mishandling plagued him during much of his presidency. In 2019, whistleblowers raised concerns that Trump was trying to transfer sensitive nuclear data to Saudi Arabia. In 2019 Trump was also the first U.S. president to confirm that U.S. nuclear weapons are housed at an air base in Turkey, long considered an open secret, and tweeted out a classified satellite photo of an explosion at a space launch facility in Iran, despite pushback from aides. So far he has not faced consequences for any of these actions.

The nuclear secrets the FBI is looking for could be innocuous, or they could be world-shattering. The possibilities are so large that there’s no way to know. Historically, the consequences for stealing nuclear secrets in America are pretty dire. Early Trump lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn made his career by prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for stealing nuclear secrets and passing them to the Soviet Union. Cohn won the case, and the Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair.