Dr. Arms Control Wonk here. Noah’s running around today, so I’ve hijacked the blog for moment.
Retro fashions don’t usually appeal to nuclear weapons designers, save for the odd Members Only jacket you spot on some poor refugee from the 1980s
So you might be surprised to find that uranium — which fell out of favor with US nuclear weaponeers in the 1950s — may be the hip Fall fashion in certain New Mexican locales.
Over at my blog, I’ve started a discussion about a story John Fleck broke in the subscription only Albuquerque Journal.
Bob Peurifoy, a retired Sandia executive, favors dumping plutonium weapons in favor of low-tech uranium designs. Actually, Peurifoy prefers the current US arsenal, but Congress says the weapons labs should relax Cold War design requirements to build new warheads that are more reliable and require less toxic industrial processes.
In that case, Peurifoy says, you can’t do better than Uranium 235, which isn’t nearly as expensive, toxic or fickle as plutonium.
Although a simpe uranium device (above, right) would produce a relatively small yield — on the order of tens of kilotons — dropping one on Kim Jong Il’s Pleasure Palace would still ruin his day.
(Special Retro Bonus: Click here for a retro shot of former Sandia, and perhaps future Los Alamos, Director C. Paul Robinson).
Retro-nukes
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Retro, righto. Do any of our missiles have the throw weight? Certainly couldn’t MIRV them. A B-52 could carry maybe two of these old gun-type nukes.
It’s a joke, right?
They’re hoping the world will go back to 35,000 # nukes so the islamo-whackos can’t put one into a backpack and walk into New Yawk City with it.
The Sandia dude has been drinking the cooling water from his reactor.
HA, HA! It is for me to laugh. Whoever heard (or cared) about a nuclear bomb that was environmentally safe? If there ain’t no one left to enjoy it, then why do it?
An environmentaly safe nuke would be correctly named if used. Since there would no one left to enjoy, it also means there would be no one left to pollute. Maybe the garden of eden would return without anyone for the snake to manipulate.
Environmentally correct nuke? Seems like you would need to fill out an environmental impact statement prior to setting it off and then run a survey to make sure that there aren’t any endangered species or threatened critters at ground zero. Wouldn’t you know that it would really lower property values? That alone would make it unpopular.
Just do IT & store it for Use.
Test at NV Test site again.
Surface testing now?
Why not.
Hey, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. I bought one of those things on Ebay and took it out the the pasture (no city codes) to set it off. It wasn’t nearly ten kilotons so don’t waste your money.
The largest pure-fission nuclear device ever tested was made of HEU (highly enriched uranium) – a lot of it, admittedly, but in the Ivy Mike shot it yielded 500 Kt (half a megaton) and was deployed as the “Mk 18.” Until thermonuclear weapons of comparable size and deployability were developed, the Mk 18 remained a major part of the US nuclear arsenal (when H-bombs with roughly the same specs came out, then the HEU in the Mk 18s was coveted for other uses such as ADMs, nuclear artillery shells, anti-missile warheads, or the 9 Mt Mk 53, where the HEU allowed “cleaner” primaries for boosted fission devices)
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