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US's Most Powerful Nuclear Bomb Being Dismantled
SpuriousLogic sends this excerpt from an AP report:
"The last of the nation's most powerful nuclear bombs — a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service at the height of the Cold War. The final components of the B53 bomb will be broken down Tuesday at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility. ... The weapon is considered dismantled when the roughly 300 pounds of high explosives inside are separated from the special nuclear material, known as the pit. The uranium pits from bombs dismantled at Pantex will be stored on an interim basis at the plant, Cunningham said. The material and components are then processed, which includes sanitizing, recycling and disposal, the National Nuclear Security Administration said last fall when it announced the Texas plant's role in the B53 dismantling."
The final components will be accidentally dropped Tuesday at the Amarillo Crater...
Can't we just drop it on the Middle East instead?
Since it wasn't included in the synopsis...
Setting the stage for Metal Gear Solid!
What I wanted to know most wasn't in the summary. The Fine Article tells me that the B53 is 9 megatons.
This is a good thing, the B53 was a last ditch weapon intended to take out the hardened bunkers of the Soviet leadership, except it was air burst which is a highly, highly ineffective was to take out a bunker. The replacement is a much smaller, much less dirty penetrator weapon, the B61 Mod 11.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
They should have at least tried to sell it on eBay first to recoup some of those tax dolars -- pick up only, of course.
"The Mk/B- 53 was the oldest and highest yield thermonuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal until 2010. It was one of the most powerful nuclear weapons ever built by the United States with a yield of 9 megatons of TNT (38 PJ)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb
2010? And was? Is this implying there is a more powerful nuclear weapon or is this speaking in the tense that they have been disabled and no longer exist?
I can image someone there blowing up a brown bag and popping it behind one of the workers who's dismantling this.
How does this help our nation? Oops I said the N-word, my apologies to the offended parties.
They should try it first, see if all the mechanisms still work after all these years.
Well i guess i won't see the days of bombtown in fallout. with a large undetonated bomb is just sitting in town square.
I wonder how the history books will address these weapons 50 or a 100 years from now. Will people then truly understand the insanity that led a democracy to create war machines powerful enough to end all life on this planet? I was a child when the Cold War ended but even a decade and a half later it seems so pointless.
Once again Barack Hussein Obama, the traitorous Muslim he is, is significantly weakening the defenses of this country for the benefit of his al qaeda brethren. Impeach Obama in 2012!
(obligatory simpsons reference)
Children in Amarillo are advised not to shout "boo" too loudly, lest they startle the workers just as they are disassembling B53.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
From the article:
Today's bombs are smaller but more precise, reducing the amount of collateral damage, Kristensen said.
Amusing, considering that he is talking about bombs tens of thousand times more powerful than the largest non-nuclear munitions.
I suppose it's just a happy coincidence that the project raked billions of dollars through the hands of the elite who made it happen.
Or, roughly 200 grams of antimatter...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The warhead on a Titan II missle was also 9 megatons, just for reference. Not sure if it was the same design, but 9 megatons wasn't really all that large a weapon. While it may be the largest weapon deployed, the Russians had a test device that would have yielded 100 megatons.
I suspect a far more interesting value for nuclear weapon ratings would be the effective blast radius, both as an airburst and at ground level. 9 megatons might be something that would wipe out an entire large metropolitan area, or it might be something that would just take out a city center. The difference is significant.
In today's climate, it is unlikely any state-level actor would really want to take out an entire metropolitan area. And certainly, anything that would be able to be moved by non-state-level actors would be unlikely to have a yield big enough to do that.
Slashdot is totally stagnated. Where is the fresh pasture?
Without being specific I can tell you that I helped maintain 15 megaton TN weapons
Should have dropped it on Israel instead.
Shouldn't you keep something like that around, just in case a large lump of space rock heads in our direction ?
Will now go into monitoring communications between people!
When government's don't need to worry about each other they have more time to worry about their citizens!
I love you big brother, can I borrow your car? I'll spy on your GF (Canada) and report back to you I promise!
It would land with parachutes, wait for the dropping plane to clear the area, and explode. This would send a shock wave through the ground to the bunker.
Even the new B61 has an airburst option, and dial-a-yield too (actually, even some older warheads had dial-a-yield, such as the Lance).
How does this help our nation?
I know you're trolling but ask a semi-legitimate question. A better question is what value is there in keeping it around? And the answer is none, it's been replaced and we can't afford to keep it around. Fortunately neither can the Russians, thus the New START treaty enables both sides to get rid of their warheads, whilst inspecting that the other side got rid of theirs. This means it's in America's national interest for the warheads that are active to be the most useful ones, and that's not necessarily the ones with the biggest boom.
Also a dismantled rusting nuke is better than a rusting nuke. These things are getting old and it either needed upgrading or replacing. Interestingly it's already been replaced by the B61, so why it was still sitting around I'm not entirely sure. Anyway as you probably know old bombs with decaying conventional explosives in them sometimes go off by accident because the conventional explosive gets unstable. Now nuclear bombs have safeguards against that accidental detonation, especially the more modern ones, however you would NOT want to have to clean up the mess one of these made even if it was just detonated with a conventional explosive.
The B53 was not the most powerful bomb the US had in service. the B41 (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb) had a theoretical maximum yield of 25 megatons, making it more powerful than even the Castle Bravo Shrimp device which had a yield of 15 megatons. The only stronger detonation was the Soviet RDS-220, or "Tsar Bomba", which had a yield of 57 megatons, reduced from 100 by replacing the uranium tamper with a lead one in order to reduce fallout.
If you can talk brilliantly enough about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
What would the proper possessive format be?
... this so called "most powerful bomb" is useless like all the other nuclear weapons except for "global suicide" .
Claude LaFreniere aka climenole
What? No country invaded the US for having weapons of mass destruction?, what?, ahhh, they have to be imaginary in order to get yourself invaded, damn Saddam, if you'd only had one of these you'll still be alive.
US' is plural possessive
Somebody dismantled us the bomb :(
My website
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/most-powerful-nuclear-bomb-being-dismantled-1319554769-slideshow/b53-bomb-photo-1319554682.html
Here. http://www.carloslabs.com/node/20
An approximation of thermal pulse radius, overpressure, and fallout drift for several bomb yields, including Ivy Mike (10 Mt), overlaid on Google Maps.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
NASA is running out of plutonium for RTG electric generators for deep space probes. They should recycle the weapons grade plutonium to make RTG fuel.
The part about this that alarms me is that it is public knowledge where "the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility" is located. Whether or not it is actually the only one, expect this to be on the short list of our enemies' targets.
All that work, just to tear it apart. Why not find the worlds largest dog doo, and blow it up!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Me too, except I was imagining the Soviet bomb squad de-activating it, and some US general going loopy as he realises that's the only one they've got and the danged Russkies have just switched it off... "... so whadda we going to do now?!"
...of value was lost. Let's move ahead and invest time and money in useful things.
Why waste a perfectly good nuclear weapon? They should explode it on Mecca, and take care of two problems at once.
China is now producing new warheads. In addition, if you pay attention, all of the 'rouge' nations producing nukes are around China. And ALL are friendly to China. If we drop our nukes too far, then China will at some point, realize that they CAN win a nuke war.
I wonder how fast we could reassemble it if we really needed to ?
Im all for open government and all, but I could do without people knowing exactly where this is done and stored
More to the point, having a big ass nuke like this thing requires a big ass rocket to lift it.
The one in the picture has fins. I believe the delivery is done by bomber...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why would you hit an asteroid with a nuke? So you can crack it in half and it makes 2 craters instead of one?
That's pretty amazing. Knowing that Russia's "Tzar Bomba" test utilized only half of the real weapon's 100 megaton charge, and that the subsequent explosion scared nuclear science into setting a goal of eventually not doing that any more (at least as I interpreted it), I expected our own "biggest bomb" to be some ginormous dinosaur we were too cautious to reveal let alone keep on stock. Here we have this modest, naval warfare weapon. That speaks volumes about America's conservativism towards nuclear weapons. Not only is its disarmament a nice show for people who want to believe nukes never happened, it's also a good mark for the people who are often accused of being trigger-happy, gung-ho, and sci-fi.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The well ordering principal disagrees.
Well there goes our protection from asteriods :) I figure 6 of these detonated at a particular timing/pattern would do a nice bit of work to any rock more than 24months out from hitting earth.
The Tsar Bomba was more of a dick-waving move by the Soviets than anything else. It was too large to be reasonably used. You could put all of one of them in a very, very large plane it wouldn't work on a missile. That would mean that delivery would be very impractical and the chance of it getting shot down would be high.
The bombs the US has could be fit on to B2s which means that it is feasible they could actually be delivered to targets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspUEjMLsdA
Sniff. RIP bomb, the giver and the taker, the maker and the dismemberer. Sniff.
Little boy bomb == 15kt. B53=9MT. That's _6000 times more powerful_, not " a few hundred". Classic /. math.
Big bombs like this are not designed to take out hardened targets, as an early poster asserts, but rather to compensate for inaccurate delivery systems like aircraft without GPS or missiles that might miss by miles. If your accuracy is instead within a few dozens of meters, it makes a lot more sense to use the same resources ( expensive missiles and plutonium, etc. ) to make a larger number of smaller weapons. This is why our most sophisticated warheads like the w88 are a few hundred kilotons in yield - they're a few hundred pounds instead of 9000.
For some scary destructive potential, realize that a single Ohio class missile sub can carry 24 Trident II SLBMs, and each Trident II can hold 12 warheads. That's 288 separate, independently targetable warheads for the math challenged, or about the same size as the entire nuclear deterrent force of France or Britain or China. The B53 has just been obsolete for a long time.
I'm glad it's gone, and hope the others disappear soon too (shelf life vs cost being what it is, they probably will). It afforded us a form of winning which was indistinguishable from losing. In fact losing a conventional war would be preferable to winning a nuclear one...
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Some report like the Washington Post paint that the recent happening of B53 is the work of Obama and his merry Men.
Rubbish.
Barak Obama nor anyone in the White House Staff have a clue in Hell about the B53.
May Obama and his White House Staff die in a Fire Storm on DC from Russian nuclear missles.
Good Riddense.
That speaks volumes about America's conservativism towards nuclear weapons.
:-)
Genuine LOL
I do suggest you educate yourself on this topic before commenting further
Didn't they build any of those?
I mean, there was a number of combination devices but they didn't got beyond 50 megatons, but I seem to recall hearing about a test blast yielding over 200 megatons... it was an underground test and still resulted in a primary fireball that extended clear out of the atmosphere.
Anyway, we should keep a few of the big ones around. Not for rogue asteroids as someone (clearly inspired by Hollywood movies) suggested, but for those special occasions where nothing else will do. Like the probable forthcoming war with the Islamic world where the ultimate powermove would be to drop a 100+ megaton device on Mecca during the Hajj, vaporising Masjid al-Haram, the Kaaba and everything for many miles, including many millions of Muslims.
were actually in USA! But good that no need invade countries to search for it anymore ;-)