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The weapon is notable for being the smallest nuclear weapon in both weight and yield to have entered US service. It was a compact implosion device containing plutonium-239 as its fissile material, [ 1 ] and in its various versions and mods it had a yield of 10 to 1,000 tons of TNT (42 to 4,184 gigajoules ).
Its explosive yield was extremely small for a nuclear weapon. [4] [5] In the mid-1970s, debate shifted from the possibility of developing such a device for the military to concerns over its possible use in nuclear terrorism. [6] The concept became a staple of the spy thriller genre in the later Cold War era. [7]
Tactical nuclear weapons were a large part of the peak nuclear weapons stockpile levels during the Cold War. US scientists with a full-scale cut-away model of the W48, a very small tactical nuclear weapon with an explosive yield equivalent to 72 tons of TNT (0.072 kiloton). Around 100 of such shells were produced during the Cold War.
The components of a B83 nuclear bomb used by the United States. This is a list of nuclear weapons listed according to country of origin, and then by type within the states. . The United States, Russia, China and India are known to possess a nuclear triad, being capable to deliver nuclear weapons by land, sea and
Log–log plot comparing the yield (in kilotonnes) and mass (in kilograms) of various nuclear weapons developed by the United States.. The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is the amount of energy released such as blast, thermal, and nuclear radiation, when that particular nuclear weapon is detonated, usually expressed as a TNT equivalent (the standardized equivalent mass of trinitrotoluene ...
Most known innovations in nuclear weapon design originated in the United States, though some were later developed independently by other states. [3] In early news accounts, pure fission weapons were called atomic bombs or A-bombs and weapons involving fusion were called hydrogen bombs or H-bombs. Practitioners of nuclear policy, however, favor ...
Advances in nuclear weapons technology, spurred on by the first detonation of the Soviet nuclear bomb in 1949, led to great reductions in the size of nuclear weapons. By 1957, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) declared that it had created a small fission warhead that could be deployed for frontline use by infantrymen.
The Davy Crockett artillery shell is the smallest known nuclear weapon developed by the US. The Mk-17 was an early US thermonuclear weapon and weighed around 21 short tons (19,000 kg). Other delivery methods included nuclear artillery shells, mines such as the Medium Atomic Demolition Munition and the novel Blue Peacock , nuclear depth bombs ...