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Variable yield weapon, most powerful US weapon in active service. B53 nuclear bomb: 9,000 38,000 Was the most powerful US bomb in active service until 1997. 50 were retained as part of the "Hedge" portion of the Enduring Stockpile until completely dismantled in 2011. [3] The Mod 11 variant of the B61 replaced the B53 in the bunker busting role.
English: Logarithmic scatterplot comparing the yield (in kilotons) and weight (in kilograms) of all nuclear weapons developed by the United States, 1945-1993. Weapons variable yield and weight have been plotted at their highest yield and weight.
The nuclear shaped charge concept was also studied extensively in the 1980s as part of Project Prometheus, along with bomb-pumped lasers. Using a combination of explosive wave-shaping and "gun-barrel" design, up to 5% of a small nuclear bomb could reportedly be converted into kinetic energy driving a beam of particles with a beam angle of 0.001 ...
Shaped-charge effects driven by nuclear explosions have been discussed speculatively, but are not known to have been produced in fact. [ 81 ] [ 82 ] [ 83 ] For example, the early nuclear weapons designer Ted Taylor was quoted as saying, in the context of shaped charges, "A one-kiloton fission device, shaped properly, could make a hole ten feet ...
TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion.The ton of TNT is a unit of energy defined by convention to be 4.184 gigajoules (1 gigacalorie), [1] which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a metric ton (1,000 kilograms) of TNT.
The United States nuclear program since its inception has experienced accidents of varying forms, ranging from single-casualty research experiments (such as that of Louis Slotin during the Manhattan Project), to the nuclear fallout dispersion of the Castle Bravo shot in 1954, to accidents such as crashes of aircraft carrying nuclear weapons ...
According to an audit by the Brookings Institution, between 1940 and 1996, the US spent $11.3 trillion in present-day terms [6] on nuclear weapons programs. 57 percent of which was spent on building delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons. 6.3 percent of the total, $709 billion in present-day terms, was spent on weapon nuclear waste management ...
The nominal spherical critical mass for an untampered 235 U nuclear weapon is 56 kilograms (123 lb), [6] which would form a sphere 17.32 centimetres (6.82 in) in diameter. The material must be 85% or more of 235 U and is known as weapons grade uranium, though for a crude and inefficient weapon 20% enrichment is sufficient (called weapon(s)-usable).