End of an Era

[CherBear]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45031536/ns/us_news-security/#.Tqbk7N4r2so

Story about how the last of the US's largest nukes are being disassembled. Size of a minivan and 100x more potent than the Hiroshima explosive.

 

[Wallyman]

And right up the road from me. hmm.. oh well.

 

[Matt S.]

"Since it was made using older technology by engineers who have since retired or died, developing a disassembly process took time. Engineers had to develop complex tools and new procedures to ensure safety."

I am fully on board with disarming and disassembling these kinds of weapons that we can ALMOST not service or use any more. I do however wish that we would be replacing them with cooler more awesome devices of mass destruction.

 

[tbburg]

'Kinda glad we never had a reason to find out how well they worked.

 

[xcm]

good news, if it isnt some ploy.
we dont need planet-buster bombs.

 

[tbburg]

No. not a ploy. It would probably have been scrapped soon anyway. There's only one platform that could deliver one of those, and getting a BUFF over a target worth using that on would be kind of tough these days. And you would have to get over it too. That bad boy is a gravity bomb, not a stand-off weapon.

I'm kind of surprised there are any of them left at this point, to be honest. Nuclear weapons are kind of twitchy things to begin with. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't capable of a full yield explosion at this point.
'Read somewhere that when they took the first gen. Polaris warheads out of service, they discovered the entire lot of them wouldn't go bang. Something to do with part of the safety system which had deteriorated and would have prevented the secondary ignition.



Planet-buster. What a great name! The Mount St. Helens eruption released more energy then all of the existing atomic bombs on the planet.

This is kind of funny, Quote from wikipedia:

The B53 was 12-foot-6-inch (3.81 m) long with a diameter of 50 inches (1.27 m). It weighed 8,850 pounds (4,010 kg), including the 800-to-900 lb (360-to-410 kg) parachute system and the honeycomb aluminum nose cone,...

..,The W53 warhead of the Titan II ICBM used the same physics package as the B53, without the air drop-specific components like the parachute system, reducing its mass to 8.13 lb (3.69 kg). With a yield of 9 Megatons, it was the highest yield warhead ever deployed on a US missile.

Something tells me there may be a mis-placed decimal point in that last sentence.

 

[n1ywb]

This bomb, designed to be carried by a B52, was obsolete the day the ICBM was invented. I wonder why they even kept it around so long?

Mt Saint Helens is really an amazing place. It's difficult to imagine what a 250 square mile supersonic 2000degF pyroclastic flow must be like, although considering how the landscape looks like even after 30 years, you can get some idea.

 

[bigalpha]

Mt Saint Helens is really an amazing place. It's difficult to imagine what a 250 square mile supersonic 2000degF pyroclastic flow must be like, although considering how the landscape looks like even after 30 years, you can get some idea.

I went and visited MSH and it was insane. The landscape is still destroyed from the flow. I took a lot of pics of it, but this one is cool.

 

[87manche]

This bomb, designed to be carried by a B52, was obsolete the day the ICBM was invented. I wonder why they even kept it around so long?

what else was to be done with it? It's not like you can toss it in the dumpster. Better to leave it stable in it's original configuration until we can figure out what to do with it's bits.

it's not like we had a disposal plan when we built them, well, we did, but not much chance of the original disposal plan happening now.

 

[RedHeep]

We still have conventionally launched weapons because there is always a chance that the fancy electronic gizmo's will not work if we enter a nuclear war.

 

[tbburg]

According to wikipedia, the last b-53s in stock were bunkerbusters. They carried what is called a "lay down" delivery method. Multiple parachutes would slow the final descent, and a shock absorbing nose section allowed intact grounding. Then it would go off and the resulting ground transmitted shock wave would collapse any nearby in-ground structures.

 

[GrimmJeeper]

He says it's "a milestone accomplishment" and a step toward President Barack Obama's mission to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Disarming us has nothing to do with ridding the world of nuclear weapons. It's just not possible. As long as someone, somewhere, knows how to build a nuke, they will always be a threat. The above quote makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Unless we start assassinating everyone smart enough to build a nuclear weapon that is, then I'm all for it

 

[tbburg]

Unless we start assassinating everyone smart enough to build a nuclear weapon that is, then I'm all for it

Are you volunteering for euthanasia? Anyone who can keep a Jeep running probably has the smarts to build a nuk. The problem isn't being smart enough to build one, it's being smart enough to invent one. We don't need to be that smart, because someone already was,.. And they wrote down how to do it.