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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.