US's Most Powerful Nuclear Bomb Being Dismantled 299
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the swords-to-nuclear-plowshares dept.
from the swords-to-nuclear-plowshares dept.
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."
9 Megatons (Score:5, Informative)
amusing quote (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Oops (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty unlikely to trigger a nuclear explosion considering the requirements to reach criticality in a bomb. In most cases, you'll have explosives go off by accident on such a bomb, they don't do enough compression to cause criticality and end up being essentially a dirty bomb scattering highly enriched uranium or plutonium around.
Which is what bunker is designed to protect against.
Re:Most Powerful? (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Wish granted. (Score:4, Informative)
Here. http://www.carloslabs.com/node/20 [carloslabs.com]
An approximation of thermal pulse radius, overpressure, and fallout drift for several bomb yields, including Ivy Mike (10 Mt), overlaid on Google Maps.
Re:Oops (Score:4, Informative)
Oops, you mis-used a word there. You mean a 'critical mass' would not be caused and no nuclear detonation would result. The much more likely 'criticality' condition is a non-critical mass that causes the thermal explosion that has the same effect as a 'dirty' bomb.
Criticality -- the point at which a fuel assembly can sustain a nuclear chain reaction by itself.
Critical mass -- the smallest mass of fuel for which the criticality is reached; depends on geometry, density, temperature etc.
So the GP's usage is correct. To be really precise, one could note that weapon fuel should go from subcritical to prompt critical to achieve explosion, but that would be nitpicking in this context.