Rohit:

Here are two stories about tacit knowledge.

1. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory hired three fresh PhDs with little nuclear physics background and asked them to go build a nuke, and they did.
2. The DoE in the 1990s realised they didn’t know how to make a particular foam crucial to nuclear warheads, and spent a decade and $70m inventing a substitute– (h/t Leopold)

They pleasingly mirror each other, which is nice for storytelling but kind of a paradox. In one, we spend untold millions in figuring out the smallest moving part to manufacture, and in the other some smart alec fresh faces postdocs made a goddamn nuke.

So which is it, tacit knowledge is impossible to easily replicate or smart folks can just figure stuff out?

The first story. How did they do it?