7 ms·

Nuclear Weapon Archive (1994-2020)

88 points by azalemeth 5y ago

azalemeth 5y ago
The amount of detail in this site -- all publicly available and in the public domain -- is incredible. In particular, I think that the section about the physics of the weapons are fascinating, detailed, and terrifying. I find it oddly compelling to read 'forbidden knowledge' of this sort. As a site, it also has that 90s "pure html" lightweight vibe...
- coobird 5y ago
  Definitely looked the same (TABLE layouts and all) back when I was browsing through it during the mid-90s on dial-up. I recall it was a gray background rather than bright white, but maybe because Netscape's default background was gray back then...
jf 5y ago
If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser which describes the details of America’s nuclear arms through the lens of an accident at a Titan II missile silo that could have gone very badly.
- jeff_vader 5y ago
  I'd also recommend "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - arethuza 5y ago
    I'd also strongly recommend that book - with the note that I found it rather profoundly upsetting. For some reason the expected fate of Finland particularly struck me.
- JoeDaDude 5y ago
  One more recommendation: The Swords of Armgeddon" by Chuck Hansen. Published as a CD ROM, it is full of historical references and photos: http://www.uscoldwar.com/ http://www.uscoldwar.com/
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    It is no longer sold, as far as I can tell. Hansen's widow was selling it after his death. You are supposed to send an email to order it (now as PDF downloads rather than optical disc). I emailed to order back in March of this year and never got a response. I more recently discovered that it has been uploaded to Library Genesis so I got it there. Swords of Armageddon is a history that quotes from primary sources very extensively. That's the bulk of the publication, by word count. It lends itself to more skimming than detailed reading in many sections due to this approach. These documents are more about policy, politics, and planning than about technical details. That may be due to Hansen's relative weakness on the technical side as well as due to source availability; I'm sure that documents about the diplomatic considerations following Operation Castle were more readily declassified than documents about the device data. Hansen's early introductory material contains some odd blunders about e.g. the physical properties of deuterium. Don't let that discourage you. Most of the book is so primary-source-driven that his powers of interpretation take a back seat. There are surely other histories of the post-war Atomic Energy Commission. This is the first book I have read that makes it clear what a leviathan it was. In 1956, the AEC alone accounted for 3.2% of the federal government's budget (not counting nuclear weapons costs allocated to other departments like Defense). This is comparable to NASA's share in the Apollo era of the following decade, but the AEC operated with much more secrecy. It spent billions of dollars on weapons improvements that were obsoleted in just a few more years by even greater improvements. It was the era of Moore's Law for mass destruction. One small interesting thing I learned: AEC had a multitude of reasons for experimenting with uranium 233 bred from thorium. Almost all of these reasons were related to nuclear weapons. U-233 was used in many nuclear weapons test series, though the details of usage (except for the one Operation Teapot test) have yet to be declassified.
- echoradio 5y ago
  Second. Worth noting: PBS’ “American Experience” did a documentary (part docudrama?) on the accident which was okay, but not as nearly as outstanding as the book. I read the book is the result of seven years of research. The text itself is 500 pages with ~110 of notes and references. Schlosser’s book (at times) reads like fiction. I enjoyed how he weaved the story of the Damascus accident and history of America’s nuclear program seamlessly to a climax. It is one of my favorite books of on both subject matter and writing style.
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
Questions for anyone who maybe knows answers: How likely is that there are nuclear weapons beyond listed in the article, something as Black projects? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project) Also I am curious, when new nuclear weapons are developed, as testing is banned, how do scientist know what will be the effects/yields/outcomes? I mean theory is well known, but again in practice there are always some unexpected thing that can happen.
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
  For instance if someone attempt to build something as "quarksplosion" how would they know without testing? https://www.newsweek.com/subatomic-event-more-powerful-hydrogen-bomb-discovered-scaring-scientists-so-700779 https://www.newsweek.com/subatomic-event-more-powerful-hydro...
- nabla9 5y ago
  The article lists black projects. Like Israeli and South African nukes. Subcritical testing is allowed by CTBT. Computer simulations can do the rest.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  > Also I am curious, when new nuclear weapons are developed, as testing is banned, how do scientist know what will be the effects/yields/outcomes? I'm sure that the detailed answers to that are highly classified. My answer to this would be to observe three things: a) that there have been no publicly-disclosed substantially new designs in a really remarkably long time (remember -- we're talking about 1950s-1960s technology!); b) the underlying physics is well understood; and c) the amount of computing power available now is many orders of magnitude higher than in the 1940s. Practically, this means two things: i) the governing equations and scaling laws are relatively well-understood, and have been experimentally validated; ii) the parts of the simulation that require detailed numerical codes were developed quite a long time ago, and have also been experimentally validated -- this was literally one of the first ever applications of computing and I am sure that they all have detailed notes. Somewhere there is a tale about an old DEC machine being used as a timekeeping clock in an underground explosion by printing out its CPU timers over a high-speed serial link, and the experimenters noting when the signal stopped. The core "physics package" is something that has been highly optimised with literally trillions of $CURRENCY's worth of man-hours over the last half-century. The real difficulty -- as this website beautifully shows -- is not in understanding the undergraduate-level physics behind it; it's in getting the starting materials and actually making the thing work well. For that, we can all be grateful. Separately, another answer to the "how do you test things without testing" is by looking for analogues in terms of the insane pressures, temperatures and timescales that go on in these things. There's a reason that the US has NIF [1], the national ignition [laser] fusion facility, which helps both basic science and...not. Similar experiments include hydrodynamic blast testing [2] in which the behaviours of materials under extreme strain rates, driven by high explosives, are performed. The idea again is to validate the core simulation model of "what goes down" in the ps-ns-µs-ms that the explosion lasts, with its distinct phases. It's hard to stress how different materials are under high strain rates -- e.g. unreinforced concrete, often thought of as 'hard', performs poorly and plastically under similar conditions; very high velocity (gas-gun fired) projectiles can deform it very easily and penetrate for literally tens of meters. The challenge of design comes down to taking an assembly, and instantaneously doubling (or more) the density at its core, without jets, or spalling. All of these have analogous problems elsewhere in physics. Subcritical testing is allowed, as are explosions/detonations with other radioactive compounds, which can be followed by high-speed gamma-cameras to permit a determination of the degree of compression. Historically these were used a lot -- see the RaLa experiment [3], which was required to ascertain the behavior of converging shock waves (needed to achieve the spherical implosion necessary for compression of the plutonium pit) -- but instead of using plutonium, they used a radiotracer (Radioactive Lanthanum) in a sphere made of an inert material. > Questions for anyone who maybe knows answers: How likely is that there are nuclear weapons beyond listed in the article, something as Black projects? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project) I think this is unlikely, largely because there isn't a military need for them. Black projects have historically been for useful things. We're already at the point whereby the US or Russia alone could literally annihilate most humans on earth, with their existing, 1980s designs and materials. A lot of the focus -- I understand -- of this area of research is on detecting other nation's activities, and ensuring that "your" own stockpile is safe, and ready. MAD was mad, but it was effective. My gut feeling is that, if anything, US black projects are more likely to focus on asymmetric / information warfare, yet more low-observable aircraft or spacecraft, and, above all, intelligence gathering, cryptography, and similar. We have the doomsday machine. We showed that we could have the doomsday machine literally a lifetime ago. I hope above all that we never use it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility [2] https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/hydrodynamic.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/hydrodynamic.htm [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaLa_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaLa_Experiment
neuroscihacker 5y ago
This is a pretty excellent site. A few years ago, I worked on a series on nuclear weapons and recently released one of the articles. There's a backlog of articles you can read by clicking on the publication including on the physics. https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/4-nuclear-blast-effects-and-thermal-radiation-74d268497493 https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/4-nuclear-blast-eff... https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/2-the-physics-package-how-does-a-nuclear-weapon-work-b695b347ed50 https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/2-the-physics-packa...
fabian2k 5y ago
> The end of surface testing of nuclear weapons after the atmospheric test ban treaty effectively removed "cleanliness" as a significant concern for designers. Complaints about fall-out vanished, and so did the ability of the international community to monitor weapon design through fall-out analysis. The cost-effectiveness of lighter weapons put great pressure on designers to extract weight saving however they could, and it is likely that the idea of using non-fissile tampers disappeared very quickly. There is scant evidence that so-called "clean" designs were ever deployed in any quantity. I found this pretty interesting, if somewhat disconcerting. I always assumed that modern nuclear weapons were "cleaner" than older ones. Not sure if this was a misunderstanding on my side or a common misconception I adopted. If I understand this part correctly, the "cleaner" designs have significantly worse yield at higher weight, and are unlikely to be actually used today. Though I'm not entirely sure if this only compared relatively modern nuclear weapons and whether there are other aspects to this that affect how "clean" nuclear weapons are.
- arethuza 5y ago
  Cleaner designs tend to leave out the final fission stage in the standard fission-fusion-fission "H-bomb" design - as this is where most energy is generated even though fissioning uranium with neutrons from the fusion step is, I believe, inherently messy. Edit: I'd have thought the biggest factor in how messy things would be is whether it is a ground or air burst, rather than the weapon design.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Is radioactive fallout from a thermo-nuclear weapon an important consideration (compared to the destruction of the "thermo" part)? The bombs dropped in Japan only contained a few kg of fissile material, those cities were rebuilt within years. Modern bombs are probably way bigger, but even a W78 warhead comes in at only 120 kg or so and I'm guessing most of that is not plutonium. Compare this to the thousands of tons of radioactive or activated material that flew around Europe following the steam explosion at Chernobyl.
    - 5y ago
xendo 5y ago
Another rabbit hole to follow: > [W-88] production terminated by FBI raid on Rocky Flats;
- brettermeier 5y ago
  It seems like they just polluted everything: "The 116-page affidavit led to a raid this week by the FBI and Environmental Protection Agency on the Colorado plant. It catalogs an eight-year pattern of illegal dumping, burning and polluting against a backdrop of bureaucratic cover-ups and foot-dragging." (see https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2ZMcAAAAIBAJ&pg=6928%2C5420357 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2ZMcAAAAIBAJ&pg=6928%2...)
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"The US has admitted to having 32 broken arrows with 6 nukes never being recovered." "By some accounts, the Soviet Union built hundreds of [suitcase nukes], of which several dozen were missing. Based on other reports, suitcase nukes were never built in large numbers or were never deployed." People in charge of nukes are like us, they make mistakes. Thats why we shouldnt have 12,000 of them
- gibspaulding 5y ago
  Wikipedia has a nice list of "Military Nuclear Accidents" if you enjoy doom-scrolling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
chasd00 5y ago
I've read this site many times over the years, i've been fascinated by nukes since childhood. If you ever get a chance to visit the Nuclear Science and History museum in Albuquerque New Mexico jump on it. On my visit I remember walking out across a hot dusty chalk rock yard to the back corner and being able to actually touch a B53 casing. There's something surreal about being alone in that back corner thinking about the physics, engineering, politics, and dread around what i have my hands physically on while looking out to the desert mountains in the distance. EDIT: i remember as a child in 80s constantly rattling off nuke facts to my father. One night, i'll never forget, he just yelled "enough!" and i never spoke of it again. As a kid, i was fascinated and interested, as an adult he knew very well what was on the line during the Cold War.
- Jeema101 5y ago
  The National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, OH also has a B53 casing at the entrance of their Cold War exhibit. I think the sign for it just says rather bluntly "B53 Thermonuclear Bomb", which I always found kind of funny in a dark Dr-Strangelove-esque kind of way. https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/195680/b53-thermonuclear-bomb/ https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact... Edit: The one right near the entrance is actually a B41. The B53 is somewhere else in the exhibit (apparently they have multiple H-bomb casings).
  - TimMeade 5y ago
    I remember going to the USAF Museum in Dayton when i got out of the air force. One of the last things i worked on was the new AGM-129 cruise missile that we could "neither confirm nor deny" it existed. I went to the museum and they had one on display. Blew my mind as i thought the shape was classified.
  - TimMeade 5y ago
    Years ago they had the B-53 and other bombs under the B-36 bay. But they have moved the plane since then.
- mallomarmeasle 5y ago
superkuh 5y ago
I spent an almost pathological amount of time reading this site as a teenager in the later half of the 90s. It's really cool it is still online. This is what peak websites look like: packed full of information written in text with images. Nothing needing to be executed, function over form, and incredibly long lasting and robust.
aerostable_slug 5y ago
Sublette is active on nuke-related subs on Reddit these days. It's kinda funny when someone argues against him by quoting his own work...

88 points by azalemeth 5y ago

The amount of detail in this site -- all publicly available and in the public domain -- is incredible. In particular, I think that the section about the physics of the weapons are fascinating, detailed, and terrifying. I find it oddly compelling to read 'forbidden knowledge' of this sort. As a site, it also has that 90s "pure html" lightweight vibe...

coobird 5y ago
Definitely looked the same (TABLE layouts and all) back when I was browsing through it during the mid-90s on dial-up. I recall it was a gray background rather than bright white, but maybe because Netscape's default background was gray back then...

jf 5y ago

If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser which describes the details of America’s nuclear arms through the lens of an accident at a Titan II missile silo that could have gone very badly.

jeff_vader 5y ago
I'd also recommend "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- arethuza 5y ago
  I'd also strongly recommend that book - with the note that I found it rather profoundly upsetting. For some reason the expected fate of Finland particularly struck me.
JoeDaDude 5y ago
One more recommendation: The Swords of Armgeddon" by Chuck Hansen. Published as a CD ROM, it is full of historical references and photos: http://www.uscoldwar.com/ http://www.uscoldwar.com/
- philipkglass 5y ago
  It is no longer sold, as far as I can tell. Hansen's widow was selling it after his death. You are supposed to send an email to order it (now as PDF downloads rather than optical disc). I emailed to order back in March of this year and never got a response. I more recently discovered that it has been uploaded to Library Genesis so I got it there. Swords of Armageddon is a history that quotes from primary sources very extensively. That's the bulk of the publication, by word count. It lends itself to more skimming than detailed reading in many sections due to this approach. These documents are more about policy, politics, and planning than about technical details. That may be due to Hansen's relative weakness on the technical side as well as due to source availability; I'm sure that documents about the diplomatic considerations following Operation Castle were more readily declassified than documents about the device data. Hansen's early introductory material contains some odd blunders about e.g. the physical properties of deuterium. Don't let that discourage you. Most of the book is so primary-source-driven that his powers of interpretation take a back seat. There are surely other histories of the post-war Atomic Energy Commission. This is the first book I have read that makes it clear what a leviathan it was. In 1956, the AEC alone accounted for 3.2% of the federal government's budget (not counting nuclear weapons costs allocated to other departments like Defense). This is comparable to NASA's share in the Apollo era of the following decade, but the AEC operated with much more secrecy. It spent billions of dollars on weapons improvements that were obsoleted in just a few more years by even greater improvements. It was the era of Moore's Law for mass destruction. One small interesting thing I learned: AEC had a multitude of reasons for experimenting with uranium 233 bred from thorium. Almost all of these reasons were related to nuclear weapons. U-233 was used in many nuclear weapons test series, though the details of usage (except for the one Operation Teapot test) have yet to be declassified.
echoradio 5y ago
Second. Worth noting: PBS’ “American Experience” did a documentary (part docudrama?) on the accident which was okay, but not as nearly as outstanding as the book. I read the book is the result of seven years of research. The text itself is 500 pages with ~110 of notes and references. Schlosser’s book (at times) reads like fiction. I enjoyed how he weaved the story of the Damascus accident and history of America’s nuclear program seamlessly to a climax. It is one of my favorite books of on both subject matter and writing style.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

Questions for anyone who maybe knows answers: How likely is that there are nuclear weapons beyond listed in the article, something as Black projects? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project) Also I am curious, when new nuclear weapons are developed, as testing is banned, how do scientist know what will be the effects/yields/outcomes? I mean theory is well known, but again in practice there are always some unexpected thing that can happen.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
For instance if someone attempt to build something as "quarksplosion" how would they know without testing? https://www.newsweek.com/subatomic-event-more-powerful-hydrogen-bomb-discovered-scaring-scientists-so-700779 https://www.newsweek.com/subatomic-event-more-powerful-hydro...
nabla9 5y ago
The article lists black projects. Like Israeli and South African nukes. Subcritical testing is allowed by CTBT. Computer simulations can do the rest.
azalemeth 5y ago
> Also I am curious, when new nuclear weapons are developed, as testing is banned, how do scientist know what will be the effects/yields/outcomes? I'm sure that the detailed answers to that are highly classified. My answer to this would be to observe three things: a) that there have been no publicly-disclosed substantially new designs in a really remarkably long time (remember -- we're talking about 1950s-1960s technology!); b) the underlying physics is well understood; and c) the amount of computing power available now is many orders of magnitude higher than in the 1940s. Practically, this means two things: i) the governing equations and scaling laws are relatively well-understood, and have been experimentally validated; ii) the parts of the simulation that require detailed numerical codes were developed quite a long time ago, and have also been experimentally validated -- this was literally one of the first ever applications of computing and I am sure that they all have detailed notes. Somewhere there is a tale about an old DEC machine being used as a timekeeping clock in an underground explosion by printing out its CPU timers over a high-speed serial link, and the experimenters noting when the signal stopped. The core "physics package" is something that has been highly optimised with literally trillions of $CURRENCY's worth of man-hours over the last half-century. The real difficulty -- as this website beautifully shows -- is not in understanding the undergraduate-level physics behind it; it's in getting the starting materials and actually making the thing work well. For that, we can all be grateful. Separately, another answer to the "how do you test things without testing" is by looking for analogues in terms of the insane pressures, temperatures and timescales that go on in these things. There's a reason that the US has NIF [1], the national ignition [laser] fusion facility, which helps both basic science and...not. Similar experiments include hydrodynamic blast testing [2] in which the behaviours of materials under extreme strain rates, driven by high explosives, are performed. The idea again is to validate the core simulation model of "what goes down" in the ps-ns-µs-ms that the explosion lasts, with its distinct phases. It's hard to stress how different materials are under high strain rates -- e.g. unreinforced concrete, often thought of as 'hard', performs poorly and plastically under similar conditions; very high velocity (gas-gun fired) projectiles can deform it very easily and penetrate for literally tens of meters. The challenge of design comes down to taking an assembly, and instantaneously doubling (or more) the density at its core, without jets, or spalling. All of these have analogous problems elsewhere in physics. Subcritical testing is allowed, as are explosions/detonations with other radioactive compounds, which can be followed by high-speed gamma-cameras to permit a determination of the degree of compression. Historically these were used a lot -- see the RaLa experiment [3], which was required to ascertain the behavior of converging shock waves (needed to achieve the spherical implosion necessary for compression of the plutonium pit) -- but instead of using plutonium, they used a radiotracer (Radioactive Lanthanum) in a sphere made of an inert material. > Questions for anyone who maybe knows answers: How likely is that there are nuclear weapons beyond listed in the article, something as Black projects? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_project) I think this is unlikely, largely because there isn't a military need for them. Black projects have historically been for useful things. We're already at the point whereby the US or Russia alone could literally annihilate most humans on earth, with their existing, 1980s designs and materials. A lot of the focus -- I understand -- of this area of research is on detecting other nation's activities, and ensuring that "your" own stockpile is safe, and ready. MAD was mad, but it was effective. My gut feeling is that, if anything, US black projects are more likely to focus on asymmetric / information warfare, yet more low-observable aircraft or spacecraft, and, above all, intelligence gathering, cryptography, and similar. We have the doomsday machine. We showed that we could have the doomsday machine literally a lifetime ago. I hope above all that we never use it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility [2] https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/hydrodynamic.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/hydrodynamic.htm [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaLa_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaLa_Experiment

neuroscihacker 5y ago

This is a pretty excellent site. A few years ago, I worked on a series on nuclear weapons and recently released one of the articles. There's a backlog of articles you can read by clicking on the publication including on the physics. https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/4-nuclear-blast-effects-and-thermal-radiation-74d268497493 https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/4-nuclear-blast-eff... https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/2-the-physics-package-how-does-a-nuclear-weapon-work-b695b347ed50 https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/2-the-physics-packa...

fabian2k 5y ago

> The end of surface testing of nuclear weapons after the atmospheric test ban treaty effectively removed "cleanliness" as a significant concern for designers. Complaints about fall-out vanished, and so did the ability of the international community to monitor weapon design through fall-out analysis. The cost-effectiveness of lighter weapons put great pressure on designers to extract weight saving however they could, and it is likely that the idea of using non-fissile tampers disappeared very quickly. There is scant evidence that so-called "clean" designs were ever deployed in any quantity. I found this pretty interesting, if somewhat disconcerting. I always assumed that modern nuclear weapons were "cleaner" than older ones. Not sure if this was a misunderstanding on my side or a common misconception I adopted. If I understand this part correctly, the "cleaner" designs have significantly worse yield at higher weight, and are unlikely to be actually used today. Though I'm not entirely sure if this only compared relatively modern nuclear weapons and whether there are other aspects to this that affect how "clean" nuclear weapons are.

arethuza 5y ago
Cleaner designs tend to leave out the final fission stage in the standard fission-fusion-fission "H-bomb" design - as this is where most energy is generated even though fissioning uranium with neutrons from the fusion step is, I believe, inherently messy. Edit: I'd have thought the biggest factor in how messy things would be is whether it is a ground or air burst, rather than the weapon design.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Is radioactive fallout from a thermo-nuclear weapon an important consideration (compared to the destruction of the "thermo" part)? The bombs dropped in Japan only contained a few kg of fissile material, those cities were rebuilt within years. Modern bombs are probably way bigger, but even a W78 warhead comes in at only 120 kg or so and I'm guessing most of that is not plutonium. Compare this to the thousands of tons of radioactive or activated material that flew around Europe following the steam explosion at Chernobyl.
  - 5y ago

xendo 5y ago

Another rabbit hole to follow: > [W-88] production terminated by FBI raid on Rocky Flats;

brettermeier 5y ago
It seems like they just polluted everything: "The 116-page affidavit led to a raid this week by the FBI and Environmental Protection Agency on the Colorado plant. It catalogs an eight-year pattern of illegal dumping, burning and polluting against a backdrop of bureaucratic cover-ups and foot-dragging." (see https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2ZMcAAAAIBAJ&pg=6928%2C5420357 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2ZMcAAAAIBAJ&pg=6928%2...)

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"The US has admitted to having 32 broken arrows with 6 nukes never being recovered." "By some accounts, the Soviet Union built hundreds of [suitcase nukes], of which several dozen were missing. Based on other reports, suitcase nukes were never built in large numbers or were never deployed." People in charge of nukes are like us, they make mistakes. Thats why we shouldnt have 12,000 of them

gibspaulding 5y ago
Wikipedia has a nice list of "Military Nuclear Accidents" if you enjoy doom-scrolling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

chasd00 5y ago

I've read this site many times over the years, i've been fascinated by nukes since childhood. If you ever get a chance to visit the Nuclear Science and History museum in Albuquerque New Mexico jump on it. On my visit I remember walking out across a hot dusty chalk rock yard to the back corner and being able to actually touch a B53 casing. There's something surreal about being alone in that back corner thinking about the physics, engineering, politics, and dread around what i have my hands physically on while looking out to the desert mountains in the distance. EDIT: i remember as a child in 80s constantly rattling off nuke facts to my father. One night, i'll never forget, he just yelled "enough!" and i never spoke of it again. As a kid, i was fascinated and interested, as an adult he knew very well what was on the line during the Cold War.

Jeema101 5y ago
The National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, OH also has a B53 casing at the entrance of their Cold War exhibit. I think the sign for it just says rather bluntly "B53 Thermonuclear Bomb", which I always found kind of funny in a dark Dr-Strangelove-esque kind of way. https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/195680/b53-thermonuclear-bomb/ https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact... Edit: The one right near the entrance is actually a B41. The B53 is somewhere else in the exhibit (apparently they have multiple H-bomb casings).
- TimMeade 5y ago
  I remember going to the USAF Museum in Dayton when i got out of the air force. One of the last things i worked on was the new AGM-129 cruise missile that we could "neither confirm nor deny" it existed. I went to the museum and they had one on display. Blew my mind as i thought the shape was classified.
- TimMeade 5y ago
  Years ago they had the B-53 and other bombs under the B-36 bay. But they have moved the plane since then.
mallomarmeasle 5y ago

superkuh 5y ago

I spent an almost pathological amount of time reading this site as a teenager in the later half of the 90s. It's really cool it is still online. This is what peak websites look like: packed full of information written in text with images. Nothing needing to be executed, function over form, and incredibly long lasting and robust.

aerostable_slug 5y ago

Sublette is active on nuke-related subs on Reddit these days. It's kinda funny when someone argues against him by quoting his own work...