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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?"
Clearly someone tried to nuke the whales, and then covered it up!
Gotta nuke somethin'!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Fishing is good around that thing...
Look it's a GIANT TUNA! And it glows in the dark. And has 3 eyes.
On the one hand, a recovery would be expensive, dangerous, and probably unnecessary. On the other hand, if we leave it there... the terrorists win.
Love the Third Amendment?
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.
This really doesn't fill me with happy thoughts... Bottom of the ocean is far too lax a description, you can practically paddle in the North Sea between the UK and the rest of Europe! The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
AHA! THAT'S where Saddam hid it.
If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?
Utah would be a good spot.
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
Dear Mr Laden,
We would be more than happy to send you the Thermonuclear Bomb for the low price of $1.99, with shipping and handeling of $2,000,000. Our packers pack your item with the best foam and plastic poppers, so you can be confident to recieve your item without any damage. Remember, if you dislike your purchase for any reason, you can return it for no questions asked. Please remember we have a $25% restocking fee, and shipping is non-refundable. Thank you for shopping with ebay.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke...
... who forever shall be known as 'Duke Nukem'
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 that decided to build this bomb
It's called the American people. We decided as a whole that given the circumstances we had to build atomic bombs. Was that the right choice? I dunno, but don't kid yourself, we all acquiesced to this course of action with our votes.
Its non-functioning, nukes have a shelf life of ~5 years before the plutonium turns into another isotope.
Steaming pile of bullshit. I swear, if the subject has the word "nuclear" in it, Slashdot's about as reliable as the Weekly World News.
The isotope of plutonium used in nuclear weapons is Pu-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years. After 5 years, almost all of the Pu-239 in a nuclear weapon will still be Pu-239.
In addition the Mark 15 Mod 0's an odd bomb.
Modern thermonuclear weapons are three-stage devices. There's a small fission trigger, whose yield is boosted by tritium injection. The radiation from the trigger ignites fusion in a second stage of lithium deuteride. Then the neutrons coming off of the fusion stage can be used to fission the bomb's tamper, made of uranium-238. U-238 won't sustain a chain reaction, but it'll fission merrily if you bombard it with fast neutrons. So, basically the boosted primary accounts for a minority of the weapon's yield, and the second stage, the fusion segment, accounts for the majority. But you can design things so that the majority of the yield comes from fission of the U-238 tamper.
The Mark 15's kind of an inversion of this. It was an early fusion bomb, back when they were still using liquid deuterium in some designs. In the Mark 15 Mod 0, the third stage is the bomb's casing, which is made of highly-enriched uranium, almost pure U-235.
Yes, the bomb's casing is almost-weapons-grade uranium. By making the case out of HEU, they didn't need to worry so much about efficient compression of the fusion stage, because the fissioning of that huge amount of HEU would send the whole thing thermonyclear. Inefficient, sure, but they hadn't quite figured everything out yet.
That's why this bomb's a concern. According to the Air Force, the primary, the 'pit,' wasn't placed in the bomb, so the primary can't detonate. Even if they're bullshitting, the twin traumas of impact and age have probably so screwed up the internals of the bomb that the only detonation possible would be low-order, a fizzle, biggest problem would be the environmental effects of scattering that much radioactive material into the river.
So that's not the concern. The concern is that whoever recovers it now has his hands on well over a ton of weapons-grade uranium, easily enough to make not one, but several crude Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs. I mean, this was a bomb that had a total yield of 1.7 megatons, and 1.3 megatons of that came from fission. That's a lot of U-235.
This was the device tested as Castle Nectar.
We would be more than happy to send you the Thermonuclear Bomb for the low price of $1.99, with shipping and handeling of $2,000,000.
No, no - shipping is free for the esteemed My Bin Laden (long time customer and all). However, we will require that he take personal delivery.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
It should be retrieved. If this were a modern fission-fusion-fission bomb, it wouldn't be a concern. The Air Force says it doesn't have the fission trigger installed, so with a modern device that means you don't have a bomb. You need a fission bomb to ignite the lithium deuteride in the fusion stage, and you need the neutrons from the fusion stage to fission the U-238 jacket. So, again, no primary, no bomb. Leave it there, rivers already feed natural uranium into the oceans at a rate of 3.2x10^4 tons every year.
But this isn't a modern bomb, it was a transitional device between the earliest, liquid-dueterium monsters and modern three-stage designs. They weren't yet sure how to achieve efficient compression of the fusion stage, so they wrapped the bomb in highly-enriched uranium to be sure the fusion stage would light off. The bomb had a design yield of 1.7 megatons, and something like 1.3 megatons of that would be due to the fission of the U-235 jacket.
That means that this bomb contains a lot of almost-weapons-grade uranium. Again, 1.3 megatons of yield from the fission of uranium. The largest pure-fission bomb we ever detonated was the 500-kiloton Mark 18 prototype, and that used about 60 kilograms of HEU. Assuming linear scaling, that means we're looking at upwards of 156 kilograms of HEU in this bomb. Critical mass of uranium's about 16 kilograms. Double that to overengineer a bomb, and that means whoever gets their mitts on this thing could build 4 or 5 crude Hiroshima-type bombs, each with a yield of several kilotons.
That's bad. They need to retrive this thing, even if there's a risk they blow it up in situ. I'd rather have some of this stuff scattered in an unusable form offshore than have Mohammed and his band of Merry Pranksters get their hands on 4 or 5 cities' worth of U-235.
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.
I appreciate the information you have brought into the discussion. Your post not only blows away the disinformation of the grandparent post, but adds new and relevent information, as well.
What I'd like to mention, however, is that there is another concern: The bomb is sitting above a fresh-water aquifer used by the nearby town. As, according to another source I read, the barrier between this device and the aquifer is only a (thick) layer of clay, I would imagine that there has already been some level of contamination to the drinking water. As the bomb settles and slowly sinks, likely being more dense than the surrounding clay, the contamination levels will rise.
The hard part, and the most expensive aspect to the retreival situation, is that a crew would have to retrieve the bomb without collapsing the aquifer roof and using equipment that would prevent radiation poisoning of the retrieval crew. Add to that the fact that the bomb is under twenty feet of silt, and you have a very tricky situation. You can't just build a four-sided dam to keep the water out--like those used to construct bridge pylons--and it would take some very specialized and delicate equipment to remove enough silt to retrieve the bomb without spreading contaminated silt everywhere.
It's a difficult situation, to say the least. The good news is that there few sea-floor excavation vehicles capable of retrieving the bomb, even without the contamination issue, and that an excavation going on in that area, now that the (supposed) find has been publicized, will draw a huge amount of suspicion. Due to the weight of the bomb itself and the sheer volume of silt required to be removed before the bomb could even be reached, it wouldn't exactly be an overnight job. The threat of terrorists digging up a piece of the bomb is, therefore, less than the threat of terrorists getting their hands on a seperate source of radioactive materials and building an atomic bomb.
[Hopefully, I'm not spreading bad information, myself, now.]
~UP
Eat the Path.
Very informative and very frightening. Googling "Castle Nectar" returned - among others - this interesting page: Project Castle with an image of the beast.
668.5
LICK IT! LICK IT!
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Er, um, you're about 20% correct. Chemical explosions top out around 10,000 degrees, barely 1/1000th the temp required. They don't use "numerous" fission explosions, one will do, you just reflect the radiation around so it's coming from all sides. The neutron bomb didnt use chemical explosives, just a regular fission bomb with the parameters juggled for maximum radiation and minimum blast. Even so there was still about 30% blast effects. Pu is totally worthless nowdays, the US has about 18 tons of excess Pu that it would like to get rid of, the Russians likewise.. We may have to build several billion dollar reactors just to burn up the excess Pu.
Close, very close, but not quite right. The trigger is a single fission bomb; the radiation it produces is redirected cleverly so as to compress the fusion charge (a concept referred to as a "Hohlraum"). In some designs there are more than two "stages" where fission triggers fusion, which then is used to trigger more fission or, in some cases, another fusion stage (the Soviet "Tsar Bomba" was a multistage fusion device of 60-120 Mtons. Check out the Nuclear Weapons FAQ for more info.
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.
Not the neutron bomb I'm familiar with. It was a very low-yield fission-triggered device that had a fusion stage. There has long been a dream at LLNL to figure out how to initiate fusion with a conventional high-explosive trigger, but to my knowledge, no such weapon has ever been tested or fielded. The neutron bomb of the 80's would have created plenty of fallout and radioactivity; the point was it created less blast damage and so didn't sound as bad (the fallout was sort-of ignored).
He is talking about the tritiated lithium hydride,....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.
I think there is a small mis-understanding here. A fusion weapon of this type uses tritium to boost the yield of the fission trigger, NOT as a component in the fusion main stage fuel. The fusion stage creates the tritum needed at the time of explosion by neutron-spallation of the Lithium. So, after 4 half-lives the fission trigger yield will be greatly reduced - probably enough to prevent any significant second-stage fusion. This means that if it exploded, the yield would be in the 10-kiloton range, not the megaton range. However, if the fusion stage were to ignite, it would do so with as much yield as ever.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
The later planned usage in Europe was *not* to kill people without destroying property (that was propaganda from those opposed to NATO, but not Soviet, nuclear weapons). Instead, the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations while reducing damage to nearby West German towns and cities (due to the reduced fallout and blast - the radiation blast as noted above falls off quickly away from ground zero).
Don't fool yourself. If there had been a referendum, a hundred bombs would have been dropped on as many cities in Japan. WWII-era America wasn't particularly pacifist. Hell, even most of the 'usual suspect' pacifists of today were involved because of the 'United Front' with the state that followed their favored system of political economy.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
By the first time the American public learned about Atomic weapons, the die was already cast.
We had created two nukes and used them. We didn't have to build more. But the American people elected JFK in part because he tolds us that we needed to build more nukes to achieve parity with the Soviet Union. We elected Eisenhower who was building more nukes. If the American public hadn't wanted nukes, they had more than enough opportunity to tell their presidents and congressmen that.
Not that America is alone in this; India, the UK, France and Israel are other democratic nations that chose to join the nuclear club, even knowing what they were capable of. Even after widespread knowledge of their nuclear programs, none of those nations has voted to dismantle their nukes.
A nuclear bomb (e.g. Hiroshima) works by fission. A hydrogen bomb works by fusion, but needs a nuclear bomb to trigger it.
Any idea how a nucular bomb works?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
maybe a little offtopic, but does it scare anyone else how much these cats know about nuclear explosives and such?
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
Yeah, you drop it out of your airplane with a guy riding it waving his cowboy hat around. It then goes boom.
-Charlie
"The Emperor had been told that war could not be won as early as February 1942. In 1943, the [Japanese] navy had reached the conclusion that defeat was inevitable. In 1944 Tojo had been thrown out by a navy putsch. None of this made any difference. The fear of assassination was too great. In May 1945 Russia was asked to mediate. But Stalin sat on the offer, since in January at Yalta he had been promised substantial territorial rewards to enter the Japanese war in August.
... prosecute the war to the bitter end'. The final plan for the defense of Japan itself, 'Operation Decision', provided for 10,000 suicide planes (most converted trainers), fifty-three infantry divisions and twenty-five brigades: 2,350,000 trained troops would fight on the beaches, backed by 4 million army and navy civil employees and a civilian militia of 28 million .
On 6 June the Japanese Supreme Council approved a document, 'Fundamental Policy to be Followed hensceforth in the Conduct of the War,' which asserted 'we shall
They were to have weapons which included muzzle-loaders, bamboo spears and bows and arrows. The Allied commanders assumed that their own forces must expect up to a million casualties if an invasion of Japan became necessary. How many Japanese would lives would be lost? Assuming comparable ratios to those already experienced, it would be in the range of 10-20 million.
The Allied aim was to break Japanese resistance before an invasion became unavoidable. On 1 August, 820 B29's unloaded 6,600 tons of explosive on five towns in North Kyushu. Five days later America's one, untested uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan's eighth largest city, headquarters of the 2nd General Army and an important embarkation port. Some 720,000 leaflets warning that the city would be 'obliterated' had been dropped two days before . No notice was taken..."
-- Johnson, Paul: Modern Times
Read your history.