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Lost Nuclear Bomb Found Off Georgia Coast?
securitas writes "Both CNN and ABC News report that a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb lost off the Georgia coast in 1958 may have been found. The 'Mark 15, Mod 0' nuclear bomb was jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean off Savannah after a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter collided in mid-air. 'The 7,600-pound, 12-foot-long thermonuclear bomb contained 400 pounds of high explosives as well as uranium' and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke,, who said that radiation levels were from seven to 10 times higher than normal. If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
"the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?" Is it just me or does anybody think the answer to this question would be better arrived at by the US government than the "Other" people that would be interested in the device?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Those that decided to build this bomb should be forced to dive down to it themselves in a diving suit of choice and pick it up with their bare hands and bring it to the surface. Those who make a mess should be responsible for cleaning up after themselves. They're probably dead though.
For one thing it's a danger to the local marine environment. There's no telling how long radiation levels in the area have been higher than normal, but leaving a nuke with decaying seals on it will do nothing for the area.
And, for another thing, you want to go retrieve it before someone else does. Nuclear - or should that be "nu-cu-lar"? - material lying there just waiting to be had is a potential goldmine for a terrorist organisation, etc. The symbolism of using an American nuke to make the material for its own nuclear device, dirty bomb, or whatever against the very people that built it would be just the kind of thing that Al Qaeda would love.
Bottom line: it's there, you know where it is, so go get it so it's out of play.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Obviously, we need to get it back and get rid of it. If an arab group or someone else with a chip on their shoulder got their filthy hands on it, there's no telling what could happen.
Ummm, the mosque in my community is an arab group.
Let's keep the racial bigotry, subconcious or not, to a minimum.
Oh yes, an arab group.
Why not a neo nazi group, a christian group or a mormon group with a submarine horse drawn cart? Singling out any of the above shows equal understanding of how many groups have a chip against the US Government.
It's not so much the risk of a nuclear explosion as for the conventional explosives...
I live in a country with a 300 billion dollar annual PEACETIME military budget, and they can't locate an accidentally dropped nuclear bomb in 12 feet of water to recover it?
Instead, a hobbiest treasure hunter with a civilian boat and a WalMart geiger counter has to do the job for them and send the US military a GPS point.
That makes me sick to my stomach, no wonder we can't find Osama or WMD's.
Tell me again who's the real winner when it takes a 5 billion dollar nuclear aircraft carrier to deploy a 20 million dollar plane flown by a pilot with a million dollar education, dropping a ten thousand dollar bomb just to kill some Iraqi kid hiding in a hole with a $20 russian surplus rifle?
This to me is symbolic of everything that's wrong with our bloated defense budget.
Vote libertarian!!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
But there is still the problem that most likely this thing would be difficult to recover. Its not like jumping into the deep end of the pool and retrieving a plastic toy that sunk down there.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Don't start drooling, even if the rest of the bomb were still usable (it won't be) the fissionable material inside deteriorates quite rapidly. Nuclear warheads must be 'refurbished' every couple years or so, otherwise they deteriorate too much to explode. This one's been sitting there for how long? Forget about making it go off, without a lot of fresh material at least - and if you had that, you wouldn't need this antique.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
As an open-minded American, I lately find myself struggling with a wave of anti-islamic sentiment.
Please, folks, let's not judge or label a group by the loonies who attach themselves to it. That's the same sort of stupid reasoning Rob Enderle has against Linux, isn't it?
The grandparent should have used "terrorist," a behavioral label, rather than implying some ethnic group = terrorist.
Those who built it created it with the intent of protecting the free world. Go read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and see if you feel the same about these people you'd put at risk.
Good lord. What a dick.
So, we should have eradicated all Christians back during the crusades, who went around slaying innocent people in some self righteous bullshit holy war?
How about just saying "religious radicals", because they are all very, very deadly. Right now it's the stupid muslim extremists, but there could very well be a lot of timebomb groups just waiting to go off on a rampage.
If it was just for practice, why put any uranium in it at all? Or for that matter, why put conventional explosives in it? Sounds like "Ye olde cover up" to me.
You know, there's racism and then there's statistics. Frankly, I don't want your muslim arab community neighbors anywhere near the nuke, so lets let our government dig it up before they send down muslim arab divers to set it off and contaminate savannah's water.
wait... Where does it say this thing is broken open? TFA at ABC says "radiation levels here were from seven to 10 times higher than normal". That does not seem to be very dangerous when you look into it a little. Natural background radiation is about 1.5 mSev a year, 10 times which would be 15 mSev/yr. Radiation sickness and long term cancer risks begin around 50 mSev in a shorter period of time. You may be thinking radioactive contamination.
From Wikipedia: Radioactive contamination means the distribution in an environment of radioactive material. This differs from direct radiation because the radioactive material may be moved around by wind or water, or it may be taken up by organisms.
BTW, IAAIP (I Am An Ignorant Person)
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Put it up George W. Bush's ass and detonate the fucker.
The material used in this particular weapon is Pu-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years. That means that this device is and will be a hot-potato for much longer than you or I will be debating this subject.
1- Chechen rebels are responsible for killing kids in Russia. They don't really qualify as "arabs"
/., I'll assume you are simply ignorant and not an idiot (although you might be a troll...). You should study what OBL really wants, why his supporters are upset enough to support him, and last but not least, you should read up on what an Arab is.
2- "Radical" (rather, extremist) muslim arabs such as OBL are not intent on killing as many people as possible. Ignorant comments such as you make guarantee you'll never find political actions that could undercut their popular support.
Since you're posting on
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
7 to 10 times the radiation is not that much. You get more rads getting an X-Ray, Mamogram, or walking out into the sun that you would from standing around this thing all day. Hell, the people in the surroundin area have probably picked up more radiation from their thorium smoke detectors and radon clock faces than from the nuke.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Locally -Halifax, NS, Canada-, Dr Badawi (Imam, professor of business and religious studies at St Mary's University, Halifax) has been extremely vocal, even tireless in his advocacy. You'll see him occasionally on CBC or Vision, but I haven't seen many of his ilk on CNN or other American media.
There are a lot of Imams that are doing a lot to denounce terrorism on all sides. If they don't seem vocal enough, it's almost certainly not their fault.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
No, the *fusionable* material deteriorates rapidly.*
u m.htm).
I infer from the article that the fissionable material is enriched uranium, i.e. U235 (mixed with U238). U235 has a half life of 700 million years. (http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/urani
So there is still a chunk of weapons-grade uranium in this thing. (I agree nothing else would be of use to a would-be nuclear weapon maker.)
* Quick summary: Fission = heavy nuclei spliting. Fusion = light nuclei combining. A nuclear bomb (e.g. Hiroshima) works by fission. A hydrogen bomb works by fusion, but needs a nuclear bomb to trigger it.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Thanks. You and the wacko that's currently the Libertarian candidate for President are the 2 reasons I no longer call myself a Libertarian.
Sure, I'm still a fervent believer in the US Constitution, property rights, civil liberties, capitalism, and relative isolationism.
I also believe in killing the fsck out of crazy ratbastards that have killed or are planning to kill me and my neighbors. Better that the money earned by the sweat of my brow, then taken by the government, goes to killing bad guys than to feeding lazy ones.
If I'm not alive, my Libertarian tendencies don't mean jack squat.
He is talking about the tritiated lithium hydride, not the Pu-239 used in the surrounding triggers (which is quite salvageable from both an engineering and a financial standpoint).
A thermonuclear bomb (at least as made in the fifties) is essentially a tank of deuterated and tritiated lithium hydride (LiH) that will explode with great fury if quickly raised to a temperature of millions of degrees within a span of milliseconds. It's very difficult to create the required temperatures quickly with chemical explosives- the easiest way to do it is to surround the tank with numerous small fission devices, which heat the tank to millions of degrees quickly and easily and are responsible for the radioactive fallout still associated with fusion bombs. (The "neutron bomb" was a planned attempt to replace the fission warheads with chemical explosives, creating a thermonuclear explosion with no radioactive fallout- a truly impressive feat if it were possible.)
Since the bomb was lost 46 years ago, which is about 4 tritium half lives, the maximum possible yield has in theory been reduced to 1/16 of what it was in 1958, and the actual yield is probably zero, as you would expect of a fusion device that has spent many tritium half lives on the seafloor. The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si.
A receant one is GPS. The whole reason it was developed was for the military. They wanted to be able to easily and accuratly know the location of all their assets, be that soldiers, vehicles, or bombs. Well out of that has come the biggest advance in navigation in a long time. Commercial traffic, air, sea, and land is virtually dependant on it now.
Now it's not like this had to start as a military project, this could be done purely as a civilian endevor, but the point is that it's not like money that goes to the military just disappears. We do get returns on it outside of just the defense the military provides.
Ummm, those are countries. And they do pay attention to international law. They might not obey it, and like many countries (e.g. US) they may flout it whenever it suits them, but they certainly pay attention to it.
Let us not forget the home-grown nutcases and whack-jobs of the ilk of McVeigh, Koresh and Kaczynski (?sp). But heck, the Americans would probably invade Iran (or whoever is next on the Axis of Terror) if the IRA admitted igniting the damn thing.
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
While it is currently fashionable to believe that the only terrorists in the world are those of middle-eastern descent or belief,
Name me a major terrorist attack since the OKC bombing that was not carried out by Islamic extremists.
there are enough home grown idiots with grudges against the government to go out there with the bass-boat, a winch and a case or two of beer.
If two good-ol' boys with a bass boat and a winch can manage to excavate a 7,000 bomb buried under decades worth of sediment, the Terrorists Have Already Won(tm).
"A thermonuclear bomb (at least as made in the fifties) is essentially a tank of deuterated and tritiated lithium hydride (LiH) that will explode with great fury if quickly raised to a temperature of millions of degrees within a span of milliseconds. It's very difficult to create the required temperatures quickly with chemical explosives- the easiest way to do it is to surround the tank with numerous small fission devices, which heat the tank to millions of degrees quickly and easily and are responsible for the radioactive fallout still associated with fusion bombs." All of this technology, knowledge, money and research for what: to kill as many people as possible at the same time! Humans are a very strange species indeed.
So, we had massive incendary raids that were necessary to have any real impact on production capacity. And, unlike many places even in Germany that regarded the end of the war as a good thing, Japanese were conditioned to believe that suicide was far, far preferrable to the Emperor losing the war. When conventional forces landed on Saipan and Okinawa they were met with senseless attacks by civilians and mass suicides. Think of 10 villagers attacking a patrol with pitchforks. Women holding babies jumping off cliffs to avoid being captured and (as they were told) raped and tortured.
Because of this, it is not difficult to believe there were actually fewer civilian casualties from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than there would have been if we had invaded the "home islands". If the military wasn't finally convinced that we would burn the island down to bare rock they might never have surrendered and fought to the last civilian, all while the Emperor and military leaders quietly evacuated.
The bomb is in fact not a nuclear bomb. It is capable of carrying a nuclear armament, however when it was "lost" it was rigged in "training configuration." It has no nuclear component, but rather a large amount of conventional explosives.
You said it yourself in your quote: "[T]he risk that the conventional explosives could be detonated" - nuclear weapons are designed very precisely, so much so that a random detonation of the explosive charges won't create the symmetrical compression wave needed to ignite the fission reaction, instead, the bomb will just explode and blow itself to pieces.
It's called a "one-point-safe" design, a single point of detonation won't set off the weapon. Some bombs are even designed to be set off in this random fashion as a self-destruct mechanism if you don't want it to fall into enemy hands, but don't want to vaporize a few square miles.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I agree, but perception is what counts in politics and this is (at least partially) a PR issue for the military now.
And if FUD fscks up the economy, or politics, or whatever, it affects me. Thus, it *is* important.
Incompatable with MS Office then. It's right in the EULA that people working on WMDs can't use Office. Anyone breaking that EULA is going to be in big trouble!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'm not sure where you get thorium in smoke detectors. Most that I know are based off of Americium-241.
You'd more likely detect Thorium in your gas lamp mantle, or from antique glassware.
Americium-241 comes directly from PU-241 as it decays. The byproducts of AM-241 are Np-237, decaying in turn to Pa-233 and U-233. The AM-241 decay chain ends with bismuth-209, a stable (non-radioactive) element.
BTW, the halflife of AM-241 is 432.7 years.
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
What is scary is that they actually lost the bomb. I mean really .. how do you loose a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb ... and have it lost for over 4 decades. I wonder how many more bombs they have "lost". You would think that finding them would sort of be on the high importantance list ...
So if we put a US base in Newfoundland, Canadians shouldn't think that you really have a base in our country, because we didn't always own NF? No more than a military base in Germany or Northern Italy would be seen as French territory.
What matters is present boundaries. Some half-assed historical answers are only going to piss off people that are already angry.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
How tender hearted you are. Did you forget the Rape of Nanking by any chance? Japanese prison camps? Pearl Harbor?
How about the fact that those two nukes ended the war in a couple of days, vs. the several years and millions of lives it would have cost otherwise?
How about the incendiary attack on Tokyo? That was a beauty, made Hiroshima look like a weenie roast.
I've gotta add you're pretty cavalier with those soldiers too.
Yeah, but radioactives aren't hard to distill to 1958 levels - you can do it with a few common college textbooks, a bathtub, and a decent radiation suit. The hard part about building a bomb is the mesh of particle reflectors, back then usually just a suspension of reflective metal flakes in a particular configuration which is surprisingly difficult to achieve. That, and that it's already inside national borders, are what would have made it scary if it hadn't already been identified. ('Course now, even if it isn't dredged up already there are about a billion people with guns watching it, but still.)
StoneCypher is Full of BS