“Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?” by rba

As soon as modern data analysis became a thing, the US government has had to deal with people trying to use open source data to uncover its secrets.

During the early Cold War days and America's hydrogen bomb testing, there was an enormous amount of speculation about how the bombs actually worked. All nuclear technology involves refinement and purification of large amounts of raw substances into chemically pure substances. Armen Alchian was an economist working at RAND and reasoned that any US company working in such raw materials and supplying the government would have made a killing leading up to the tests.

After checking financial data that RAND maintained on such companies, Alchian deduced that the secret sauce in the early fusion bombs was lithium and the Lithium Corporation of America was supplying the USG. The company's stock had skyrocketed leading up to the Castle Bravo test either by way of enormous unexpected revenue gains from government contracts, or more amusingly, maybe by government insiders buying up the stock trying to make a mushroom-cloud-sized fortune with the knowledge that lithium was the key ingredient.

When word of this work got out, this story naturally ends with the FBI coming [...]

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Outline:

(01:27) Pizza is the new lithium

(03:09) The Data

(04:11) The Backtest

(04:36) Fordow bombing

(04:55) Maduro capture

(05:15) The Houthi stuff

(10:25) Coda

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First published:
January 22nd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Li3Aw7sDLXTCcQHZM/does-pentagon-pizza-theory-work

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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