The Surprising Afterlife of Unwanted Atom Bombs (nytimes.com) 122
What happens when old atomic bombs are retired? Last month, the Biden administration announced its intention to withdraw the nation's most powerful weapon from the U.S. nuclear arsenal. From a report: The bomb is called the B83. It is a hydrogen bomb that debuted in 1983 -- a time when President Reagan was denouncing Russia as "an evil empire." The government made 660 of the deadly weapons, which were to be delivered by fast bombers. The B83 was 12 feet long, had fins and packed an explosive force roughly 80 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Its job was to obliterate hardened military sites and command bunkers, including Moscow's.
What now for the B83? How many still exist is a federal secret, but not the weapon's likely fate, which may surprise anyone who assumes that getting rid of a nuclear weapon means that it vanishes from the face of the earth. Typically, nuclear arms retired from the U.S. arsenal are not melted down, pulverized, crushed, buried or otherwise destroyed. Instead, they are painstakingly disassembled, and their parts, including their deadly plutonium cores, are kept in a maze of bunkers and warehouses across the United States. Any individual facility within this gargantuan complex can act as a kind of used-parts superstore from which new weapons can -- and do -- emerge.
What now for the B83? How many still exist is a federal secret, but not the weapon's likely fate, which may surprise anyone who assumes that getting rid of a nuclear weapon means that it vanishes from the face of the earth. Typically, nuclear arms retired from the U.S. arsenal are not melted down, pulverized, crushed, buried or otherwise destroyed. Instead, they are painstakingly disassembled, and their parts, including their deadly plutonium cores, are kept in a maze of bunkers and warehouses across the United States. Any individual facility within this gargantuan complex can act as a kind of used-parts superstore from which new weapons can -- and do -- emerge.
Unwanted? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am pretty sure a lot of people want them.
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But our highest official doesn't seem to understand that it is nuclear weapons that have finally, for the first time ever since man arrived, brought a period of relative peace on earth. Isn't peace on earth our goal? If you eliminate nukes, you eliminate peace because it becomes safe to wage war again.
Correlation does not imply causation.
You're assuming that anyone who has nuclear weapons is crazy/stupid enough to actually use them -- oh, wait...
Seriously not sure if I'm being serious or trying to be funny with that last bit at this moment in time 'cause ... Putin. He's (apparently) crazy, but not stupid (or wasn't until recently).
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Correlation does not imply causation.
In this case it does.
Putin. He's (apparently) crazy, but not stupid (or wasn't until recently).
He's cunning and one way of being cunning is to appear to be crazy enough to use nukes. Reagan used the same trick. That said, Ukraine was a colossal mistake on putin's part because he failed to realize that Ukraine had asked for and received training from NATO.
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In this particular sense, he's playing the game and playing it well.
Having a nuclear arsenal is of little use if your opponent doesn't believe you'll actually use them. Part of having the arsenal is making your opponent believe that if they cross certain lines they'll get a nuke in the face. This is why there was so much tension throughout the cold war about hard-trigger alerts and command-and-control and such like - the leadership knew that it had to appear like they were ready ot use the weapons when prov
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Would they? Can you count on your opponent believing it?
If you are a citizen of the USA, can you be sure your government would use nukes if Hawaii were invaded? Alaska? Even if they know that by using the nukes they'll get nuked too? Its a lot to ask of a government to kill themselves over a principle like deterence. But if not then, when?
Similarly, if you're a UK citizen would you even want your nukes used if your enemy invaded the Channel Islands? If they then pushed through to the Isle of Wight, and then
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And most of the rest don't require flying a slow aircraft over the thing you want nuked. Well, not a manned one that you would like to survive the process at least.
We still have a shitload of Minuteman-III missiles in silos with multiple warheads on them. And a shitload of Trident SLBMs loaded into submarines that nobody can find. And cruise missiles on US Navy missile cruisers. And other smaller gravity bombs that we can still drop from aircraft if we really feel like it.
We learned back in the 60s that
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And you don't seem to understand that the B83 is only one type of nuclear weapon in the arsenal, and the one with the least use, because it requires flying an airplane over the thing you want to vaporize instead of just shooting a Minuteman-III, Trident SLBM, or a cruise missile with a W87 / W89 on it in there, which is far harder to shoot down, and gets there a hell of a lot faster.
I guess we're only talking about 475kt of kaboom instead of 1.2mt of kaboom, but that's what MIRV is for. And then you don't
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Do you really think Joe Biden just wakes up and says "today is a good day to eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons from the arsenal by fiat, with absolutely no consultation with anyone in the Pentagon, US Air Force, US Space Force, Department of Energy, or the National Nuclear Security Administration. Or Congress. Let's rip them bitches apart! YOLO!!!!"
JFC you're a moron.
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I don't think that history bears out the notion that we (the US) have fought fewer wars since becoming a nuclear power. If you try to count, it turns out to be easier to count periods of *peace* since the Barbary Wars than it is to count periods of war.
I think it is fair to say that the first have of the Twentieth Century had two *outlier* wars -- the first ever global wars. These particular kind of super-wars have not been repeated, even though the technological and economic conditions remain ripe for suc
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The US hasn't been invaded since the war of 1812.
So give Ukraine a nuke and the war will end (Score:2)
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Uh, unless you mean all wars will end because WW3 will start and humans will become extinct. The war will become WW3, that does not count as ending because it will continue in Ukraine and elsewhere too.
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brought a period of relative peace on earth.
I have no problem with people failing in history classes. After all that is just a school topic, regrettable if you are not interested in it, but forgivable.
However, if a person of your age did not notice the wars we had the recent 75 years ... sorry: that is a pity.
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Re:did you just wake from a coma? (Score:5, Funny)
enough to have eradicated the homeless many times over
Well, that's a pretty radical solution. Some people might suggest we try helping them, before we give up and just eradicate them.
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Re: did you just wake from a coma? (Score:2)
I hope you never have to be confronted with the grim reality of addiction in those you love. I've personally resuscitated a friend who had ODed in heroin and kept them breathing till the ambulance arrived. That person is now a father of 3, running a small carpentry workshop and living a good life. Not all his friends made it out alive though. I hate powder drugs with a passion but don't go giving up on its victims, addiction is a mental illness that can be cured with patience.
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if a druggie rolls the dice and loses, that was their choice to make
Gee, I sure hope you never discover that one of your relatives is one of those "losers".
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I don't know why you're being down-modded... your post is spot on.
Did you piss in someone's Cheerios?
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To some degree, nuclear weapons caused this current conflict in Ukraine.
If you take the nukes of the table, the western forces would have driven the Russians back out of Ukraine in about a week and would be happily rolling up their borders forces, taking control of Belarus, and deciding whether they wanted to push on into the Russian interior.
The western forces are so staggeringly overpowered compared to the Russians that the conflict wouldn't have lasted a couple of weeks. The only thing keeping the Russia
Re: did you just wake from a coma? (Score:2)
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Even the government has better sense than to just auction them off to the highest bidder.
Well... the US government anyway. (I'm guessing -- on both the who and what.)
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Pardon me, Joe. President Zelenskyy is on line two.
Ah, good. (Score:5, Insightful)
The most effective deterrent to violence is a credible threat of greater retaliatory violence. It is not a very pleasing fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. Preserving our ability to respond quickly to a significant threat is the best way to ensure that such a threat doesn't arise.
Making one's self weak just makes one into an attractive target.
Re:Ah, good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure how specialized the other components are. If the thing has a rocket nozzle, that might be worth saving and repurposing. The fuel (and oxidizer, if it's separate) is almost certainly unspecialized and can just be used to fuel something else. If the electronics haven't been upgraded at some point, they're several decades old and can likely just be recycled; new electronics that do the same thing would be a lot smaller and more efficient and capable of much better precision guidance; but those parts may have already been replaced somewhere along the line, so they may be a lot newer than the rest of the thing. Dunno about the outer casings and such; I can easily imagine those being fairly standardized, or fairly specialized, depending. There might be bog-standard stainless steel machine bolts in the thing for all I know; if so, those can just be treated as scrap metal (provided they're not inside the radioactive portion of the warhead).
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I'm going to hazard a guess that the components of the bomb that are the reactive materials will be separated out for storage or farily quick reuse, and everything else will be treated as mildly radioactive waste and stored in the normal way that serve in lieu of disposal. Unless another device family uses those same components they'll probably never come out of whatever hole they're placed into.
Re:Ah, good. (Score:4, Informative)
Thorium reactor designs call for a "seed" of plutonium or U-233 or U-235 to keep the reaction going. Thorium isn't actually fissile, only fertile - the Thorium fuel cycle involves Th-232 absorbing a neutron to transmute into U-233, which then has a 92% chance of fission if it absorbs a second neutron, otherwise transmuting to U-234 which is NOT fissile, but will transmute to U-235 when it absorbs a 3rd neutron, which then has a 86% chance of fissioning when absorbing a 4th neutron, and otherwise has to absorb another 4 neutrons through a transmutation chain into Pu-239 before it's fissile again... and so on and so forth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So, the number of neutrons required to fission an average thorium atom is: 92%*2 + 8%*(86%*4 + 14%*10...) = ~2.2 neutrons
Which means that to sustain a fission reaction in thorium, you need to produce *and capture* at LEAST 2.2 neutrons produced per fission event - and while I couldn't find the formulas for U-233, most U-235 fission reactions only produce 2 neutrons to begin with, with some of the less common producing 3. So basically you have to capture *all* the released neutrons to sustain a chain reaction in thorium, but in fact a whole lot will escape into the reactor's shielding instead, so you need to add a more fissile fuel to the mix to make up the difference.
Compare that to the typical reactor fuel typical U-235 fuel, which fissions in response to a single neutron while spitting out 2 or sometimes 3 new ones, so that you need to capture less than half the neutrons to sustain the chain reaction.
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Which means that to sustain a fission reaction in thorium, you need to produce *and capture* at LEAST 2.2 neutrons produced per fission event - and while I couldn't find the formulas for U-233, most U-235 fission reactions only produce 2 neutrons to begin with, with some of the less common producing 3. So basically you have to capture *all* the released neutrons to sustain a chain reaction in thorium, but in fact a whole lot will escape into the reactor's shielding instead, so you need to add a more fissile fuel to the mix to make up the difference.
Which is why thorium reactors will never happen outside of China. The other name for a thorium reactor is breeder reactor, and the US government has embarked on a global campaign to prevent the operation of breeder reactors everywhere, including domestically. They are the reactor design you need to manufacture significant quantities of plutonium, which can then be trivially refined into bomb grade material.
There are only three breeder reactors operating in the world today: two in Russia and one in India.
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That is an unfortunate historical artifact, because the fact of the matter is that a thorium reactor produces FAR less plutonium per watt than a traditional reactor.
Traditional reactors are fueled with U-235, which has a 14% chance of entering the transmutation chain to plutonium, while thorium reactors only have an 8% chance to enter the transmutation chain to the U-235 traditional reactors start with.
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You may not be aware of this, but when it comes to thermonuclear devices, anything inside the fireball is considered a direct hit. And, as the fireballs tend to be at least a mile across, you don't actually need that much precision.
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That being said, I had the opportunity to talk with a guy that worked on these things as a contractor, and he told me how the US Air Force keeps missile crews at readiness: they put a barrel on a concrete pad on an island in the south pacific and paint a bullseye on it. Then a crew at Vandenberg will launch, and they are rated on how many yards they miss the "target" by.
It's not good enough to merely drop a 450kt warhead on the city the target is in - they want to be able to put in through your bedroom win
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Since the 1990s we've been burning up plutonium in our regular commercial power reactors by making "mixed oxide" fuel where they downmix the plutonium with uranium oxide from the weapons-grade purity to reactor-grade levels and then turn it into reactor fuel assemblies. We called it the Megatons to Megawatts [world-nuclear.org] program, and it continues to this day.
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Also, modern bomb designs don't directly use deuterium and tritium because they're heavy, liquid, and a maintenance nightmare. Instead, they came up with a brilliant solution a while ago: lithium-6 deuteride. It's a stable solid metal that you can machine and put into your weapon, and it doesn't decay like tritium does in a single-digit number of years. When it's exposed to free-flying neutrons during detonation, it causes an exothermic reaction that produces your tritium and releases the deuterium for f
Re: Ah, good. (Score:1)
The radioactive core could be used to fuel nuclear reactors of various sorts. The rest of the metal is just scrap, not even high energy so can just be recycled if you want.
The only reason the government is worried is because theyâ(TM)re too incompetent to disassemble and recycle without both major bribery involved in the process ready to become the latest scandal and leaking pictures and design details to even the least advanced adversaries like Iran and North Korea.
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Absolutely. The fact that there havent been any major wars in the world between major powers since WW2 is pretty amazing considering our species' history and it is absolutely because of nuclear weapons.
They're absolutely horrible weapons but they do seem to keep the peace.
Ukraine traded nuclear weapons for treaties ... (Score:3)
Absolutely. The fact that there havent been any major wars in the world between major powers since WW2 ...
And regional powers like Russia. The USSR of the major powers timeframe is very different than Russia.
It is extremely interesting to note that Ukraine used to have nuclear weapons, like Russia, inheriting them from the collapsed USSR. Ukraine famously traded their nuclear weapons for treaties guaranteeing the sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russia was one of the nations to offer such guarantees.
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Of course this could have been averted if, instead of screaming "WW3," US leadership had said "We will protect every inch of NATO territory and every inch of Ukraine." That *might* have le
Re: Ukraine traded nuclear weapons for treaties .. (Score:4, Informative)
No, there was no such guarantee. Even Gorbachev said there wasnâ(TM)t.
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I believe that's known as MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. [wikipedia.org] It commonly used during the Cold War.
A most-fitting acronym.
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The most effective deterrent to violence is a credible threat of greater retaliatory violence.
While true, if nuclear weapons are all disarmed, the US currently has the most powerful military by far. It is thus in the US's advantage to dismantle all nuclear weapons as much as possible.
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It is thus in the US's advantage to dismantle all nuclear weapons as much as possible.
That statement is absolutely incorrect. As many of the above have stated, the existence of those weapons have proven to be an effective deterrent so dismantling them would be foolish and irresponsible because we would be giving up our biggest deterrent.
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The US would still have the biggest deterrent.
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Only a fool would think that. The only reason Putin fears us is because we can guarantee that he will die if he starts something because of our nuclear weapons. People like him will send millions of his own people to their deaths if it gives him something he wants in return regardless of value. Without the nuclear threat, the best we can do is waste valuable resources and time to surgically hunt him down to kill him.
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The only reason Putin fears us is because we can guarantee that he will die if he starts something because of our nuclear weapons.
That's not the only reason Putin fears us.
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I think this "proof" is lacking. There may be other good reasons why there have not been major world wars since WWII. The sheer horror of WWII was a strong incentive to get European countries to start talking to each other as partners, it didn't take nukes to do that. The US didn't give up on Vietnam because we were afraid of nukes, it was because the population just did not want that war anymore, at some point we mostly decided that maybe having another communist country in existence was better than all
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It sort of doesn't matter in the case of the USA. The US military is so much more powerful than any other country's (or group of countries) that it serves the same purpose as a nuclear deterence. (i.e. if you piss off the US and they send in their military, you and your government and probably most of your country are done for).
The US doens't need the nukes to have a deterence.
Conversely, because of the overwelming size and power of the US military, other nations do feel they need the nukes, as it is the on
No Choice (Score:2)
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There is one way, but someone's bound to be upset with the result.
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Untrue. Mixed-oxide reactor fuel is a thing, and it's been in use for literally decades.
We can mix the weapons-grade plutonium with uranium oxide and make reactor fuel assemblies out of it which load quite nicely into the existing fleet of commercial power reactors, where it gets fissioned into mixed-radioactive-crap unsuitable for weapons use.
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The most effective deterrent to violence is a credible threat of greater retaliatory violence.
That's a rather narrow view. More generally, it's presenting a calculus that someone has more to lose than to gain by using violence against you.
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Once you can destroy the earth with your aresenal you don't need to continue making more. And yet they do. Having the bigger gun in a standoff doesn't make you the winner, because the pop gun will kill you just as much as an AK-47 will.
I also think the theory of nuclear deterrence is overblown, especially for strategic nukes. Because even if the opponent has zero nukes, using these nukes will hurt you almost as much as it hurts them. There are people who don't care though, they honestly think it would be
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M.A.D isn't really intended to be a deterence against these things. It is intended to be a deterence against:
a) a nation state with a strong army threating your state
b) a nation state with their own nukes
In both those case, the opponent nation will want to protect their nation (which includes themselves), and therefore will not want you to nuke them.
This does not work if the opponent is:
a) a small non-territorial group
or
b) irrational, or motivated by non-material objectives (e.g. ideological fundamentalists
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The most effective deterrent to violence is a credible threat of greater retaliatory violence. It is not a very pleasing fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. Preserving our ability to respond quickly to a significant threat is the best way to ensure that such a threat doesn't arise.
Making one's self weak just makes one into an attractive target.
We've seen this movie before, they build a bigger bomb. It's fucking stupid, and maybe indicates a lack of self confidence and mommy issues.
"WHAT!? They have bigger dicks? BOMB THEM!"
https://medium.com/@alexsimpso... [medium.com]
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A big ass bomb dropped out of an aircraft gives no "ability to respond quickly to a significant threat".
You know what does? Missiles. Specifically, missiles from submarines. And we have more than enough of those to glass any country we would like within minutes.
We don't need giant megaton-class weapons dropped from slow aircraft that have to fly over the thing you want destroyed, and we haven't in quite a while. It was just easier to keep them around because they were still operational for a very specif
"Evil Empire" (Score:2)
Reagan called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire," not Russia. Eh, close enough for journalism these days I guess.
Anywhoo, weapons-grade nuclear material can be used in some nuclear reactors as fuel. The Navy has been doing this to fuel their nuclear-powered vessels for years.
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Uranium (Score:3)
You are thinking of modern nuclear weapons. The navy is using reprocessed fuel from the old uranium-based weapons.
https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
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Different name, same evil. Or have we decided to overlook Russia invading a sovereign country with a stated goal to restore the territory of the former Soviet Union?
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Nope. If Russia's frankly embarrassing performance in Ukraine has demonstrated anything, it's that Russia is NOT the USSR.
It might arguably be the same flavor of evil, but it's a weak and incompetent evil much diminished from its glory days.
Meanwhile China is embracing its newfound position as the unchallenged second-most-powerful military in the world, already distancing themselves from the political support they lent Russia at the opening of the conflict, and even going so far as stepping up to joining t
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Well sure, it's in China's best interest to support Russia just enough to keep the war going for as long as possible. Russia is hemorrhaging money, hardware, lives, and the goodwill of their own populace (to say nothing of global political capital), and the longer they keep it up, the longer it will take to recover, and the more secure China's position will be.
It's already looking like we will be down to only two superpowers in the world for *at least* the next several decades, a situation that greatly sim
USSR strength relied on many non-Russian peoples (Score:3)
Different name, same evil. Or have we decided to overlook Russia invading a sovereign country with a stated goal to restore the territory of the former Soviet Union?
Its not just a different name, there are quite material differences. For example the Ukrainian soldiers, they fought along side the Russian soldiers famously in WW2. Today's war between Ukraine and Russia provides ample evidence that Russia is no USSR, and that USSR strength relied on many non-Russian peoples.
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This one is a fusion/thermonuclear/hydrogen bomb, not the older fission/uranium/plutonium bomb. As I understand it, fusion weapons contain a fairly small fission bomb, which provides the necessary energy to start the fusion reaction. The fusion reaction generates most of the boom. I would guess that there's relatively little useful nuclear fuel for fission reactors in each of these, but I don't really know too much about them.
Re:"Evil Empire" (Score:5, Insightful)
Reagan called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire," not Russia. Eh, close enough for journalism these days I guess.
Russia was the center of the Evil Empire. Little man in charge still pines for the glory days.
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The evil Czar created the empire. but the Soviet leaders always kept the provinces in tight rein. The Soviets also demanded to be the head of world socialism and made sure other Iron Bloc nations stayed in line and looked to Moscow as their sometimes-benevolent leader. East Germany looked to Moscow for direction even in the days when East Germany was more hardline than USSR.
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Reagan called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire," not Russia.
Yeeeeeah. You do know that Putin wants to bring back the Soviet Union, complete with Cold War, right?
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Yeeeeeah. You do know that Putin wants to bring back the Soviet Union, complete with Cold War, right?
Probably. Doesn't absolve the New York Times of embarrassingly sloppy journalism.
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Rumor has it they (Score:1)
...ended up at Mar-a-Lago.
Well, this is not too big at 1.2MegaTons... (Score:2)
Later, the next largest bomb at 9MegaTons was retired.
Now we have only 1.2MegaTon or smaller bombs and missiles. I'd say, 660 of the 1.2MegaTon bombs is a bit too many, (if we still have that many). But, I'd keep 2 dozen or so, just in case someone deserves a largish mushroom cloud.
On the other hand, perhaps we should invest in a lot of neutron bombs. As in >2,000, so if someone deserves some, we can reduce
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Since the US has the largest conventional military by far, it favors the US to encourage the entire world to disarm nuclear weapons.
Re:Well, this is not too big at 1.2MegaTons... (Score:5, Funny)
Since the US has the largest conventional military by far, it favors the US to encourage the entire world to disarm nuclear weapons.
Your English is excellent!
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It is not, however, incorrect. Nukes are great levelers, which is why we have fired off so much money towards Iron Dome. We like to have the clearly superior position, and who doesn't?
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I mean what we're getting for our investment in Israel, besides the murder of journalists and the oppression of their neighbors, is access to missile defense technology.
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If I may likewise editorialize: while I'm sympathetic to the shitty position of the Palestinians and there are some Israelis who are unquestionably douchebags, I'd be more open to the "oppression of their neighbors" line if those neighbors didn't have a habit of shooting off rockets at Israel.
Well, I'm not going to debate that at the moment because I have more entertaining things to do, but let me just say that the British backed off of the plan after T.E. Lawrence explained to them what would result, but we thought it sounded groovy.
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Thanks.
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Of course, my knowledge of neutron bombs is limited, so I am guessing someone will come along a correct me.
Neutron bombs are mainly useful against formations of tanks.
Recent events and nifty new weapons show that we don't really need to worry about our adversaries' tanks anyway.
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Big-dick megaton-class weapons are fucking useless. They're big and heavy, which means they have to be delivered by relatively low-flying and slow aircraft in comparison to putting several smaller warheads on a suborbital ballistic missile which presents smaller targets to try to shoot down, which fly orders of magnitude faster. And you get the same destruction by putting a few warheads into the target instead of one big ass one, because of the inverse-cube law of expanding spheres.
There's a reason why we
The Military LOVES recycling! (Score:2)
They do it with airplane parts, tank parts, and apparently bombs.
I have no idea why the conservatives do not want civilians to use the same tried and true military techniques, like recycling.
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Yeah. Did *anyone* actually think they just throw the thing away or that radioactive material just disappears when it's no longer needed?
Of course. (Score:2)
Those things are expensive, and their parts are useful for other things. You're not going to just throw them away. That would be outrageously wasteful, even for the federal government.
Recycle and reuse (Score:2)
Obviously, the device's components all have their place in the world. The arming components most likely are destroyed by shredding and/or smelting down to slag. The explosives are taken to White Sands or a similar location for disposal by EOD.
Now the fissionables, you know the major components are all isolated and kept in separate, classified locations so they could not be recovered by Threats for reassembly. The big parts is Uranium (big surprise) and Lithium 7 Hydride. The former can be refined and use
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...was going to say the same.