US decommissions massive Cold War nuke

Wasn't that the Castle that used that term?

It does look like something Agatha and/or Gil would build, though!

@tony72

Crossed which line, exactly? Doing stuff that displeases the almighty Uncle Sam? Running their country the way they see fit, however f-ed up it might be? Joining the nuclear club without Merkin blessing?

And then you wonder why most of the world considers Americans to be violent buffoons.

(NB: I know quite a few Americans who are anything but violent buffoons, but then again, they seem to be not quite as obnoxiously loud as the Murrikah-f*k-yeah eejits.)

will anyone think of the babies ...

Bombs Are Best In All Situations !

there's something very human about violence :(

@Bill B.: "I agree... we should keep at least one just in case the apes take over"

Who do you think are in charge?

"Darwin was wrong. Man is still an ape." -- Inherit the Wind.

Bunker busting

I suspect that a bunker more than 2km underground in hard rock not prone to collapses cannot be busted. The USA put SAC HQ under a mountain for this reason. Iran has done the same with its A-bomb factories.

If you're going to try, you need to make sure that the explosive shockwave is well-coupled to the rock rather than the atmosphere. That's why a third of a megatonne detonated a few meters underground is an adequate (probably much "improved") replacement for this multimegatonne monster.

As for environment turning into "a fair replica of Venus" you've been reading too many Z-grade apocalypse-SF stories. Nature has several times inflicted far worse on the planet than our bombs ever could. The Chixulub impact was about 100 Teratonnes, several orders of magnitude more than the combined arsenals of the USSR and USA at the height of the cold war. It might have wiped out the dinosaurs - if not it helped them depart the stage. It would certainly have put the human race back to the stone age if we'd been around at the time. In the big picture, it was a fairly routine mass extinction event - nothing like as bad as the big one 200Myears earlier.

eh?

I thought it was 'critical', as in "at the point the weapon goes critical..."

Hmmm, that B53 looks like a classic Teller-Ulam - so there will be a couple of pounds of plutonium (yukky stuff to get on your pants), a good smatter of beryllium, a fair bit of lithium, a whole lot of styrofoam (it was invented for this you know - and comprises a good proportion of the plasma fireball) and a 'sparkplug' of uranium. Oh, don't forget a tiny bit of tritium in the core, too, which is why old bombs don't work so well - it decays too quickly. You know a weapon is a bit mental when it uses enriched U235 pretty much as a fuse; it is 'only' there to generate a massive gamma & xray pulse! Actually its fascinating how thermonukes work - they do real alchemy on the fly - transmuting Li into deuterium in a buggeringly short time (1/1,000,000th of a second or something)

Not a whole lot of radiation danger in dismantling it - the Pu will get reused (which is why they are dismantling it, methinks!) - the really big danger is the 500kg or so 50-year-old Torpex lenses surrounding the Pu core and Be pit. Care to point a power drill at possibly unstable old high-explosive?

Why, yes, Mr.FBI man, I do know a good deal about how to build a nuculumular barm... I learned most of it in High School I'll have you know... we even theorised how we could build a small dirty nuke from stuff we had lying around at school (this is in the mid 80's - our intended target was the Catholic school down the road)

and the build cost is....

...probably $500 in parts, minus the nuke.

Just hit it with a hammer a few times, it'll be reet...

Steven R