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Weapon No. 1, a Mark 39 Mod 2 thermonuclear weapon, as found by the explosive ordnance disposal team after the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash. On January 24, 1961, two Mark 39 Mod 2 nuclear bombs that were carried by a B-52 Stratofortress which broke up in the air and crashed near Goldsboro, North Carolina. The bombs were flung from the aircraft in ...
United States: Designated M136 AT4 in USMC and United States Army service, beginning in early 1987. [54] The AT4 was used in the US invasion of Panama, the War in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf War, and the Iraq War. [55] Over 300,000 have been built locally, under license by ATK. [2] [5] Venezuela: The AT4 has been in the Venezuelan arsenal ...
A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a lower mass, or a combination of these benefits.
In the ensuing fifty years, no one has come up with a more efficient way to build a thermonuclear bomb. It is the design of choice for the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and France, the five thermonuclear powers. On 3 September 2017 North Korea carried out what it reported as its first "two-stage thermo-nuclear weapon" test. [31]
This form of radioactive contamination is known as nuclear fallout and poses the primary risk of exposure to ionizing radiation for a large nuclear weapon. Details of nuclear weapon design also affect neutron emission: the gun-type assembly Little Boy leaked far more neutrons than the implosion-type 21 kt Fat Man because the light hydrogen ...
The Mark 4 nuclear bomb was an American implosion-type nuclear bomb based on the earlier Mark 3 Fat Man design, used in the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki.With the Mark 3 needing each individual component to be hand-assembled by only highly trained technicians under closely controlled conditions, the purpose of the Mark 4 was to produce an atomic weapon as a practical piece of ordnance.
The non-nuclear explosives in two of the weapons detonated upon impact with the ground, causing the dispersal of radioactive plutonium, which contaminated a 0.77-square-mile (2 km 2) area. The fourth, which fell into the Mediterranean Sea , was recovered intact after a search lasting two and a half months.
In a thermonuclear weapon such as the W88, nuclear fission in the primary stage causes nuclear fusion in the secondary stage, which results in the main explosion. Although the weapon employs fusion in the secondary, most of the explosive yield comes from fission of nuclear material in the primary, secondary, and casing. [8]