US's most powerful nuclear bomb being dismantled

reply to post by St Udio


The Tsar Bomba? It had a blast radius 3 times the size of the entire London Metro area. The fact that such a destructive weapon was ever built by Humans is enough for me to believe we will, eventually, accidentally or not.... destroy ourselves.

Of course during the Iraq War we wanted a fun bomb to scare the crap out of Iraqi's while flattening entire city blocks, so we invented the MOAB (Mother of all Bombs) with an 11ton yield..

So, naturally, Russia built the FOAB (Father of all Bombs) with a 44ton yield.. which is about the same size as our newer small tactical nukes.. Perhaps eventually we won't even need nukes since we keep finding more compact, cheaper and easier to maintain high explosives.

But to answer my own question as to why we would use smaller nukes.. en.wikipedia.org... We apparently invented a nuke that launches into space then carpet bombs a target with smaller nukes, actually creating more damage than a large nuke (except of course the megabombs)

the b53 isn't that bad I was a squid at one time and server on a ssbn. The ICBM on that are the ones you should fear its one missle that acts like a cluster bomb of nukes. 1 missile can take out a continent. Not to many people can say they slept under nukes.

Originally posted by TupacShakur
They should have shot it at the moon. It would be cool to watch a nuke slam into the moon and detonate.

Why have they found oil on The Moon now?

Originally posted by bluedrake
Its so sad that someone would even consider dropping bomb that is so big, imagine how many lives it would take if one 600 times smaller could take 140 000 lives

Seriously now, it was supposed to be a deterrent. The idea is that if you have a sword that big then nobody will want to fight. Unfortunately some idiots are around the world fighting over oil and the spill over from religious garbage (e.g. Israel, Ireland). Tossers the lot of them!

reply to post by TheImmaculateD1


I agree..

but let's not tell everyone..

ya know what i mean?

According to the article this bomb weighed 10,000 pounds. That would make it a little hard to deliver anywhere in my opinion. More "modern" bombs are MUCH smaller and weigh only a few hundred pounds. And, that number of around 5,000 weapons for the US nuclear arsenal is totally bogus.

The only purpose for these high yield nukes is to hold super hardened targets at risk such as Russia's Yamantau Mountain complex and others - which are still impervious to a 9 MT surface detonated weapon. Russia still has 20 MT yield warheads on some of their SS-18's to hit targets such as Cheyenne Mountain.

Originally posted by Rockpuck
reply to post by baddmove

 

I cannot fathom a reason why we would ever need a "precise" nuclear bomb.. the idea with a nuke is to wipe out entire regions/metro areas and leave the country essentially without any means of government or industry, as well as reduce population as much as possible. Would we blow up only a few blocks of a city now? Maybe leap frog and drop a nuke every other street? Ridiculous.

I would bet we have a bigger better bomb that we have not revealed to the public, or some other means of weaponry to reduce a city to ashes.

Actually I personally think that the military would be more inclined to use biological warfare over nukes anyways..

The problem with nukes is that it leaves the area uninhabitable. We have conventional weapons that are declassified with a 11 tons of tnt blast. This is as much as a small nuke. (Hiroshima was 15,000 tons I think). If that is declassified, makes you wonder what we have hidden.

Originally posted by bluedrake

The 1.5-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II killed as many as 140,000 people.

The last of the nation’s biggest nuclear bombs, a Cold War relic 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima

Its so sad that someone would even consider dropping bomb that is so big, imagine how many lives it would take if one 600 times smaller could take 140 000 lives

edit on 26-10-2011 by bluedrake because: (no reason given)

The purpose in building this bomb was so that no bombs would be dropped. It is a weapon created to never be used.

reply to post by baddmove


I am pretty sure that some of the best nuclear scientists in the world can dismantle and old bomb. It will just take a little longer.