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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...
Since it wasn't included in the synopsis...
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.
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?
Western nukes have been shrinking for years; there just isn't much use for a really big nuke other than destroying cities. A small one with precision guidance is much more useful if you actually intend to fight a nuclear war.
They should try it first, see if all the mechanisms still work after all these years.
How does this help our nation? Oops I said the N-word, my apologies to the offended parties.
By recycling it into something useful (weapons into plowshares and all that) instead of it sitting around costing money through expensive guarding, monitoring and maintenance not to mention Russia under the treaty dismantling nuclear warheads that were meant for killing us. Oh, and 0% chance of it accidentally going off once it's dismantled versus the extremely small percentage chance beforehand.
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.
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.
More to the point, having a big ass nuke like this thing requires a big ass rocket to lift it. There are no countermeasures to prevent someone from shooting your one big ass nuke into bits before it can deliver it's yield; and it costs more to build and maintain than more modern designs.
Oh, and putting 3 to 10 smaller nukes on top of a smaller rocket with better guidance packages and available space for dummy warheads delivers way more destruction for way less money. Capitalism at it's finest!
See:
inverse cube law, as it applies to expanding spheres
Titan-II ICBM
Minuteman-III ICBM
Trident D3 SLBM
Peacekeeper/MX ICBM (though these have since been retired as well)
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"I was a child when the Cold War ended but even a decade and a half later it seems so pointless."
Moderate nuclear wars were and remain quite practical. That was proven by atmospheric testing. Militaries on both sides developed procedures for continuing the fight near areas which had been nuked, including driving through them buttoned up in APCs and tanks.
Given the context of Total War which was fought in WWII, destroying enemy nations was a very reasonable option to have in the toolbox. Japan and Germany had, LITERALLY, tried to destroy many of the Allies. This wasn't some game of Risk, it was real. In that context, being able to obliterate similar threats was flawlessly RATIONAL.
Had Imperial Japan refused to surrender, it was reasonable to keep striking it until there were no more Japanese. The entire population was a weapon. The current geek weaboo view of Japan has nothing to do with the reality of what Imperial Japanese Army did to much of Asia. Japan worked long and hard to deserve every casualty it sustained, and don't forget it. The Japanese people pretend differently, but their victim neighbors are under no such delusions.
Nuclear weapons finished WWII, and deterred nuclear war thereafter.
That's a pretty good record. Don't use current PC fashion to judge history. Learn the details of why things came to be that you might better understand. Because the Cold War was fought "well enough", you enjoy tasty freedom and so does much of the former Soviet Union. Detente worked (praise be to Nixon!) and China is far freer than under Mao.
Willingness to kill billions coupled with restraint and diplomacy over time worked. Apart from a few minor scuffles the Cold War was quite peaceful. Thank atomic weapons in the hands of RATIONAL, not "insane" actors.
Without the power to kill, diplomacy means nothing because enemy power can dictate terms.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Mutually Assured Destruction (holding each others' cities hostage) may have gotten the most publicity, but you only need a few hundred nukes to accomplish MAD. The reason the U.S. and Soviets built thousands of nuclear weapons was because each one was targeted at an individual hardened missile silo or mobile launcher (and to account for a percentage of your missiles failing or being taken out). Usually those aren't located in cities, so reducing the amount of collateral damage is somewhat relevant. (This was also one of the reasons the military wanted GPS - improved accuracy was more valuable than increased explosive yield).
Will people then truly understand the insanity that led a democracy to create war machines powerful enough to end all life on this planet?
Why this focus on the US? Where's the USSR in your narrative? Will people then truly understand the insanity that led to the USSR? The subjugation of perhaps a quarter of the world's population to a brutal and soulless ideology? The creation of an even larger nuclear force than the US had in the late 70s and early 80s in terms of raw destructive power?
The history of the USSR is one of conquest and expansion from the end of the Russian Civil War in 1923 through to the end of 1945. After the demonstration of the US atomic bombs and the end of the Second World War, the USSR switched to a strategy of war via proxies. They managed to install communist governments in China, various places in south Asia, and a number of other places. The nuclear bomb forced them to cut back on their approach to global conquest and may have saved hundreds of millions of peoples' lives and billions of people from slavery in the process.
I think there's a good chance that the world of 50 to 100 years from now may well envy the stability and peace of the Cold War era. The current proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East (by Pakistan and Iran) may well cause arms races not just in the Middle East, but in Africa, Europe, and South America as well. We might start seeing nuclear weapons in the hands of small groups.
And we may see a new Cold War start between China and the US. The future may not just understand us, but go through the same thing we went through a few decades ago.
"Minor scuffles"? You mean, like the one that killed my grandfather and two to four million other people? Or the one that killed upwards of a million? Or the one that killed anywhere from 800,000 to 3,000,000? Or...
The Cold War was not particularly peaceful. I suspect that if you add up all the proxy wars, you'll get a death toll that easily exceeds that of World War I.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The well ordering principal disagrees.
I can't believe I just read that.
Yeah, those subhumans in less affluent nations don't count for squat -- which is also, coincidentally, what they get paid for assembling your consumer electronics and running shoes.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.