Lost Nuclear Bomb Found Off Georgia Coast? 820
securitas writes "Both CNN and ABC News report that a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb lost off the Georgia coast in 1958 may have been found. The 'Mark 15, Mod 0' nuclear bomb was jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean off Savannah after a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter collided in mid-air. 'The 7,600-pound, 12-foot-long thermonuclear bomb contained 400 pounds of high explosives as well as uranium' and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke,, who said that radiation levels were from seven to 10 times higher than normal. If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
lol... (Score:4, Funny)
Put it on ebay. ;)
Interested (Score:4, Funny)
Sincerely yours,
Osama bin Laden
Re:Interested (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Mr Laden,
We would be more than happy to send you the Thermonuclear Bomb for the low price of $1.99, with shipping and handeling of $2,000,000. Our packers pack your item with the best foam and plastic poppers, so you can be confident to recieve your item without any damage. Remember, if you dislike your purchase for any reason, you can return it for no questions asked. Please remember we have a $25% restocking fee, and shipping is non-refundable. Thank you for shopping with ebay.
Re:Interested (Score:5, Funny)
We would be more than happy to send you the Thermonuclear Bomb for the low price of $1.99, with shipping and handeling of $2,000,000.
No, no - shipping is free for the esteemed My Bin Laden (long time customer and all). However, we will require that he take personal delivery.
Re:Interested (Score:3, Insightful)
WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
RIGHT (Score:5, Insightful)
A thermonuclear bomb (at least as made in the fifties) is essentially a tank of deuterated and tritiated lithium hydride (LiH) that will explode with great fury if quickly raised to a temperature of millions of degrees within a span of milliseconds. It's very difficult to create the required temperatures quickly with chemical explosives- the easiest way to do it is to surround the tank with numerous small fission devices, which heat the tank to millions of degrees quickly and easily and are responsible for the radioactive fallout still associated with fusion bombs. (The "neutron bomb" was a planned attempt to replace the fission warheads with chemical explosives, creating a thermonuclear explosion with no radioactive fallout- a truly impressive feat if it were possible.)
Since the bomb was lost 46 years ago, which is about 4 tritium half lives, the maximum possible yield has in theory been reduced to 1/16 of what it was in 1958, and the actual yield is probably zero, as you would expect of a fusion device that has spent many tritium half lives on the seafloor. The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si.
Re:RIGHT (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RIGHT (Score:5, Insightful)
True - worthless to nations like the US and Russia... Not so worthless to others who have more nefarious designs.
Re:Question from a laymen, here (Score:4, Interesting)
The daughter element of Pu239 is U235.
The decay tree for a fission reaction is really complicated, though: there's a multitude of ways each atom in the sample can decay, and it may stop for a very long time as some long-lived low-level isotope before heading on down the chain.
The decay of the results of a fission reaction is complex because the fission process produces multiple isotopes of multiple elements. At the same time throwing neutrons around which can be captured changing the isotope mix. The fission products are very unlikely to decay to any form of lead, given that they tend to be in row 5 of the periodic table. Hence Sr90 and I131 being present. N.B. many of the isotopes produced by fission have such short half lives that they are difficult to detect.
Re:RIGHT (Score:5, Informative)
Close, very close, but not quite right. The trigger is a single fission bomb; the radiation it produces is redirected cleverly so as to compress the fusion charge (a concept referred to as a "Hohlraum"). In some designs there are more than two "stages" where fission triggers fusion, which then is used to trigger more fission or, in some cases, another fusion stage (the Soviet "Tsar Bomba" was a multistage fusion device of 60-120 Mtons. Check out the Nuclear Weapons FAQ [virtualschool.edu] for more info.
The "neutron bomb" was a planned attempt to replace the fission warheads with chemical explosives, creating a thermonuclear explosion with no radioactive fallout- a truly impressive feat if it were possible.
Not the neutron bomb I'm familiar with. It was a very low-yield fission-triggered device that had a fusion stage. There has long been a dream at LLNL to figure out how to initiate fusion with a conventional high-explosive trigger, but to my knowledge, no such weapon has ever been tested or fielded. The neutron bomb of the 80's would have created plenty of fallout and radioactivity; the point was it created less blast damage and so didn't sound as bad (the fallout was sort-of ignored).
He is talking about the tritiated lithium hydride,....Since the bomb was lost 46 years ago, which is about 4 tritium half lives, the maximum possible yield has in theory been reduced to 1/16 of what it was in 1958, and the actual yield is probably zero.
I think there is a small mis-understanding here. A fusion weapon of this type uses tritium to boost the yield of the fission trigger, NOT as a component in the fusion main stage fuel. The fusion stage creates the tritum needed at the time of explosion by neutron-spallation of the Lithium. So, after 4 half-lives the fission trigger yield will be greatly reduced - probably enough to prevent any significant second-stage fusion. This means that if it exploded, the yield would be in the 10-kiloton range, not the megaton range. However, if the fusion stage were to ignite, it would do so with as much yield as ever.
Re:RIGHT (Score:5, Funny)
Re:RIGHT (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RIGHT (Score:5, Interesting)
If "not sound as bad" was the intent, it sure failed at that. Whether it was a good idea or not, the neutron bomb was a public relations disaster, with it's apparent design to "kill people and leave buildings undamaged". Pointing out this became one of the favorite lines of those opposed to nuclear arms.
I'm suprised people here who obviously know a lot about these weapons seem totally unaware of the public perception of the neutron bomb.
Re:RIGHT - Err. Slightly wrong on the Neutron Bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
The later planned usage in Europe was *not* to kill people without destroying property (that was propaganda from those opposed to NATO, but not Soviet, nuclear weapons). Instead, the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations while reducing damage to nearby West German towns and cities (due to the reduced fallout and blast - the radiation blast as noted above falls off quickly away from ground zero).
Re:RIGHT (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interested (Score:3, Insightful)
I infer from the article that the fissionable material is enriched uranium, i.e. U235 (mixed with U238). U235 has a half life of 700 million years. (http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/urani u m.htm).
So there is still a chunk of weapons-grade uranium in this thing. (I agree nothing else would be of use to a would-be nuclear weapon maker.)
* Quick summary: Fission = heavy nuclei spliting. Fusion = light nuclei combining. A nuclear bomb (e.g. Hirosh
Re:Interested (Score:5, Funny)
Any idea how a nucular bomb works?
Re:Interested (Score:5, Funny)
-Charlie
Dirty Bomb (Score:3, Informative)
Then again, some people believe in the Tooth Fairy, so what are you going to do?
Re:lol... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:lol... (Score:5, Funny)
And it's a '58 model so it'll have really cool tailfins!
Re:lol... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.
This call may be recorded for purposes of quality assurance.
Hello, tech support, "Guy" speaking.
Yes, I'm having trouble with this global thermonuclear warhead, I can't get the BSD driver working!
OK sir, to help you, I have to know whether you are using Windows 98/ME or Windows XP.
This isn't either, it's BSD. I can't get the system to recognize the device at all.
Could you please first to double click on the "My Computer"...
You're from India aren't you! I'm taking this global thermonuclear warhead back to the store!
Georgia, was it? (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't work (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, this weapon might not prove terribly effective against the kind folks at SCO. [iastate.edu]
Nuke the whales! (Score:5, Funny)
Gotta nuke somethin'!
Re:Nuke the whales! (Score:5, Funny)
"Save the Whales, collect the entire set"
Re:Nuke the whales! (Score:5, Funny)
NUKE THE GAY WHALES FOR JESUS!
Answer to this question (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Please send it to the following address...
Err, maybe that's not such a good idea.
Who are you people? What? No, it's not mine.. It's engraved? I'm being framed. UNHAND ME YOU SCOUjsjcds,.......
Bet the... (Score:5, Funny)
Look it's a GIANT TUNA! And it glows in the dark. And has 3 eyes.
Re:Bet the... (Score:5, Funny)
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
I think.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I think.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called the American people. We decided as a whole that given the circumstances we had to build atomic bombs. Was that the right choice? I dunno, but don't kid yourself, we all acquiesced to this course of action with our votes.
Re:I think.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Manahttan Project was one of the more secret projects undertaken by the US military during the Second World War, and remained secret even up until the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima and Fat Man on Nagasaki. I kind of doubt there was a referendum to the American people to even start the Manhattan Project, let alone drop atomic weapons on those two cities.
Re:I think.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that the vote was unanimous. Was there ever a referendum on this? Was someone elected on a "let's build atomic bombs platform"?
In fact, I seem to recall that the first civilians to even be aware of the existence of the USA's atomic weapon program were residents of Hiroshima. By the first time the American public learned about Atomic weapons, the die was already cast.
Re:I think.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I think.. (Score:5, Insightful)
We had created two nukes and used them. We didn't have to build more. But the American people elected JFK in part because he tolds us that we needed to build more nukes to achieve parity with the Soviet Union. We elected Eisenhower who was building more nukes. If the American public hadn't wanted nukes, they had more than enough opportunity to tell their presidents and congressmen that.
Not that America is alone in this; India, the UK, France and Israel are other democratic nations that chose to join the nuclear club, even knowing what they were capable of. Even after widespread knowledge of their nuclear programs, none of those nations has voted to dismantle their nukes.
Re:I think.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the casualties taken by American forces as they moved across the Pacific - the Japanese at that time were happy to sacrifice pilots in Kamikaze raids. The infantry on the ground refused to surrender and had to be burned out by Flamethrowers.
There is no doubt that the invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in casualties on all sides of well in excess of a million people - the Japanese government at the time would have ensured this.
Whilst the dropping of the bombs may seem a shameful act today, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Ask the populations of America [and Australia and the UK, whose soldiers suffered terribly in Prisoner of War camps at the hands of the Japanese Military] in 1945 what they would wish to do, the answer would have been quite clear - drop the bombs, stop the war and get our loved ones home. And yes, there was a political dimension - the weapsons use was an indicator to Stalin of the power America now posessed - remember that even prior to the fall of Berlin, relations between the Western Powers and Soviet Russia were worsening all the time.
Finally to even try to compare the genocidal tactics of the Nazis with the dropping of atomic weapons is shameful, and shows a poor and blinkered understanding of history.
So? They were warned. (Score:5, Informative)
On 6 June the Japanese Supreme Council approved a document, 'Fundamental Policy to be Followed hensceforth in the Conduct of the War,' which asserted 'we shall
They were to have weapons which included muzzle-loaders, bamboo spears and bows and arrows. The Allied commanders assumed that their own forces must expect up to a million casualties if an invasion of Japan became necessary. How many Japanese would lives would be lost? Assuming comparable ratios to those already experienced, it would be in the range of 10-20 million.
The Allied aim was to break Japanese resistance before an invasion became unavoidable. On 1 August, 820 B29's unloaded 6,600 tons of explosive on five towns in North Kyushu. Five days later America's one, untested uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan's eighth largest city, headquarters of the 2nd General Army and an important embarkation port. Some 720,000 leaflets warning that the city would be 'obliterated' had been dropped two days before . No notice was taken..."
-- Johnson, Paul: Modern Times
Read your history.
The Sum Of All Fears (Score:5, Informative)
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.
This really doesn't fill me with happy thoughts... Bottom of the ocean is far too lax a description, you can practically paddle in the North Sea between the UK and the rest of Europe! The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care...
Simon
Re:The Sum Of All Fears (Score:3, Informative)
Trust me when I say that most of the ocean floor is deep enough that once you get beyond the continental shelf, it would take a major government to retrieve anything from the ocean floor. Mainly cause that is over a mile down.
Re:The Sum Of All Fears (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Sum Of All Fears (Score:5, Informative)
That would have been the Glomar Explorer, built and financed by Howard Hughes as a front for the CIA. It was designed for only one mission, to recover a Soviet Golf-class(?) early ballistic missile submarine. The sub had sank in water deep enough that it was considered unrecoverable. The Soviets felt that it was reliably in deep enough water that they could forget about it, it could never fall in US hands any more than they could recover it.
Enter the CIA. (Motto: nothing is impossible if you throw enough money at it) Enter Howard Hughes (Motto: nothing too crazy to throw money at) They had all the time in the world to locate the sub, design and build the Glomar Explorer. The Explorer looked innocent enough, but it had a giant claw that could be lowered from the keel of the ship to grasp a very large object very deep. Beyond Top Secret stuff, even now it sounds like something out of a James Bond movie (inspiration for The Spy Who Loved Me?). Once word finally leaked out, as it always does, the US admitted trying but said they couldn't get the sub. It is now pretty much universally accepted AFAIK, that they did get it.
The Golf sub is incredibly crude by todays standards. It carried very large, equally crude ballistic missiles so tall that they stood upright all the way to the top of the rather large sail. Still, for it's time it was quite an acheivement, and I'm sure quite a bit was learned from it.
Hey I just saw this on the Discovery Channel! (Score:5, Informative)
When Nixon was elected he was told about the sub and authorized raising it. The Glomar Explorer lifted the entire sub, but then the lifting contraption broke and 2/3 of the sub fell back to the floor. They got the front third and recovered six bodies (which they buried at sea in a russian-style ceremony), and they recoverd some code information (though I doubt codes from 1950's were much use in 1974!).
The Russians completely covered up the fact that they lost the sub, and the Americans did not say they had found it, so when the story about the Glomar Explorer leaked out, it was also the first anybody had heard about the sub sinking!
Re:The Sum Of All Fears (Score:4, Funny)
You had me until you said "nucular".
Get outta here, George!
Two words (Score:4, Funny)
Retrieval (Score:5, Interesting)
The report also estimated it would take as long as five years and cost $5 million to $11 million to recover the bomb.
Can anyone explain why the retrieval process would take so long if the bomb is supposedly "likely harmless"? I'm honestly baffled at this, and if we do not expend the money to retrieve it, are there any international accords in place to make sure our enemies do not retrieve/ reverse engineer it?
Re:Retrieval (Score:5, Funny)
Osama bin Laden: Hey, Ayman, whassup? check this out -- there's a nuke off the infidel American coast that we can blow up!
Ayman al-Zawahiri: Sorry, Osama, we can't do it; there's an international accord against it. We'll have to stick to strictly legal forms of terrorism, like hijacking airplanes and blowing up buildings.
OBL: Curses! Foiled again!
Re:Retrieval (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't just leave it there... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, for another thing, you want to go retrieve it before someone else does. Nuclear - or should that be "nu-cu-lar"? - material lying there just waiting to be had is a potential goldmine for a terrorist organisation, etc. The symbolism of using an American nuke to make the material for its own nuclear device, dirty bomb, or whatever against the very people that built it would be just the kind of thing that Al Qaeda would love.
Bottom line: it's there, you know where it is, so go get it so it's out of play.
Re:Don't just leave it there... (Score:5, Funny)
The tons of enriched Plutonium sitting in Kazahkstan (sp?) are more easily acquired by terrorists than stuff lying on the bottom of the ocean.
Still, just letting it sit there and contaminate the fish isn't a good idea.
Re:Don't just leave it there... (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who was trained by the US Navy to protect nuclear weapons, I'd like to chime in on this:
DAMN RIGHT! I busted my ass and busted peoples balls protecting nukes. There's this little thing called two-man control. At least two men have to be in the room (area) with the nuke at all times. Anyone tries to get past you, whether by force or being a sneaky bastard: double-tap! The deader the better!
And God forbid one of your shipmates breaks protocol. Officers and sailors could have their careers ruined by slipping up while protecting nukes. And I'm serious! Those alarms sound and the guns come out.
They'd (US authorities) better get their collective asses out there and retrieve this thing. Don't tell me I wasted my time pointing loaded guns at people while protecting nukes while some dumbass flyboy comes back one bomb too short and everyone turns a blind eye.
{{alright, I never pointed a loaded gun at someone while protecting nukes but it wasn't out of mind while doing so...}}But you get my point.
Got WMD? (Score:5, Funny)
Experiment? (Score:4, Interesting)
Realistically though, how many people's lives are going to be lost because of the government leaving it there all of this time? Radioactive fish, shellfish, and others do not really glow in the dark just because they are radioactive. (ie:You could have eaten radioactive fish and not known it.) So what this means is that a lot of the people who may have died of cancer over the years in that area have just cause to file suit with the US Government over this. And just as surely, with tides, currents, and the like the radioactive material has spread over at least a portion of the coast line. I'd hate to be someone living in that area right now and know that your property just became a wasteland.
Re:Experiment? (Score:3, Insightful)
disappointed in US government (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in a country with a 300 billion dollar annual PEACETIME military budget, and they can't locate an accidentally dropped nuclear bomb in 12 feet of water to recover it?
Instead, a hobbiest treasure hunter with a civilian boat and a WalMart geiger counter has to do the job for them and send the US military a GPS point.
That makes me sick to my stomach, no wonder we can't find Osama or WMD's.
Tell me again who's the real winner when it takes a 5 billion dollar nuclear aircraft carrier to deploy a 20 million dollar plane flown by a pilot with a million dollar education, dropping a ten thousand dollar bomb just to kill some Iraqi kid hiding in a hole with a $20 russian surplus rifle?
This to me is symbolic of everything that's wrong with our bloated defense budget.
Vote libertarian!!
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because Americans have an aversion to putting themselves in harms way to save money. An American soldiers life is worth untold millions in defense spending. You may not think so, but the majority of Americans do, and they vote to support that position. The Islamic fundamentalists have no such aversion, they willingly raise their children to hate non-Muslims so violently that they will strap bombs on themslves to make a statement, Americans just send in missiles and bombers. Sure they cost more than an American child on a suicide mission, but we are willing to pay that price.
Besides, it's not like we're pouring the money down a rat hole, the defense industry produces lots of jobs and lots of tax revenue to support the costs. So does NASA and a lot of other "frivilous" govt programs. Better just get used to it, it's not likely to change soon. It sure doesn't matter in this regard who gets elected President, both candidates know how to spend your money to excess, it's just a matter of what they spend it on, not whether they will, that's a given.
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing is certain, if invaders bomb/kill all your innocent family including your 7 years old daughter whose birthday you celebrated yesterday, would you die to avenge them?
I would.
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:3, Insightful)
Not casually. Vengence is a dish best served cold, and there are much more efficent things given time then just strap a bomb on my chest.
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's all right if Britian nukes Vatican City, and they will have no one to blame but the IRA, since they knew the price the Catholic world would pay?
Turning Iran into a smoking crater would take care of their nuke program and send a powerfull message to Syria, et al.
Yes; the fact that you're a violent sociopath who won't hesitate to kill hundreds of millions of people. To which every major country in the world would have no other option but to gang up to stop.
The mass murder of innocents is never acceptable. And when you start killing, you've got a lot of killing ahead of you, because even those who aren't in your current kill-zone and aren't willing to get involved for justice, might get involved so they don't have to worry about you getting pissed off at them.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, as Martin Luther King said. And your plan doesn't even come close to reaching the civility of an eye for an eye.
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends on how you look at it. Those particular people (the ones who are dead) are arguably no better off than they would have been under Saddam. But more to the point, do you really want to be the country that "isn't quite as bad as Saddam was"?
Suppose the cops came in to a bank robbery in progress, where the robbers were killing hostages right and left and demanding millions of dollars and a limo to escape in. The cops kill the robbers, shoot a handful of the customers for goods measure, take a few hundred thousand dollars and escape in their own car. They weren't nearly as bad as the robbers, were they?
Call me old fashoned, but I'd rather be on the side of good than on the side of victory. Sure, both would be nice but if our goal is to be "statistically not as evil as Saddam Hussain, on average" we are unlikely to be either.
-- MarkusQ
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:4, Insightful)
People have short attention spans. Clearly you forget that The Secretary of Defence, Colin Powell, stood in front of a TV camera several months before 9/11/2001 and specifically said that Iraq posed absolutely no threat to the United States. Why? Because they had no weapons of mass destruction, they had no means of delivering them if they did, and the embargo that the country had been under for the past ten years had crippled any plans that Saddam Hussein had for pretty much anything.
What Iraq had (or currently has) to do with Al Quaeda is an utter mystery, since the country had a secular government, whereas Al Quaeda is a collection of religious nuts who allied themselves with other religious nuts like the Taliban. And of course, they're not even from Iraq, but from a country that has been deeply nervous about them for the past 15+ years, enough to ally themselves with a bunch of infidels.
But you know, there's lots of oil in Iraq, and America is running out of places to get it. It's quickly coming down to a choice between killing all the caribou or overthrowing regimes that they propped up in the first place. The choice just gets easier when your population is screaming for blood.
Defense also produces useful advancements (Score:3, Insightful)
Now it's not like this had to start as a military project, this could be done purely as a civilian endevor, but the point is that it's not like money that goes t
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Iraq is that the US has only really seen one effective model for an invasion that pacify the population and turns them into democratic allies by using overwhelmingly destructive tactics. The people of Japan were not wooed into liking the US by offering a Democracy. They were thoroughly beaten. Their armies were destroyed, their cities were burned to the ground, and countless civilians died. The end of both Germany and Japan came through complete and total defeat of not just their militaries, but of their people. When it was all said and done, the war had been so bloody and so horrific, normally very spirited people no longer had the will to fight.
The Iraq model is something very different. The US crushed the Iraqi military, but made no attempt to crush the population. In fact, the military was not even crushed in the traditional sense of the word. Generally an army either fights to the death or surrenders. The Iraq army simply deserted under US firepower.
The point is that Iraq is a new way of fighting for the US. To put it bluntly, the US doesn't know what it is doing. They had some theories as to how to fight such a war, and most of those theories have been blown out of the water. They are not trying to kill Iraqis. On the contrary, they are trying very hard not to, and have willingly given up cities they could have easily kept through raw military force simply to spare them the destruction. The reason why there are no US troops in Filuja is not because the US doesn't have the might to take the city, but because they US doesn't know how to take the city without turning it into a heap of rubble.
Personally, I think it is a shitty situation no matter how you look at it. The US fucked up the place and they have an obligation to set thing right. On the other hand, they don't know how to set things right. They know the Afghanistan model where you just let the locals run law and order doesn't work. They know you can't carpet bomb cities any more. I have a feeling that the US will slog it out until January when Iraq holds elections. At that point, I think you can expect the new government to ask the US to leave, and the US to get the fuck out, stopping just long enough to buy souvenirs on the way to the airport. In the end, the Iraq doesn't want the Americans there, and the Americans don't want to be in Iraq.
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:3, Insightful)
Believe it or not, the one who's not dead.
Re:disappointed in US government (Score:3, Insightful)
We see really big costs and tons of money going down the drain, but the only thing the guy in the cockpit needs to do is get an 'okay' and hit the button.
Duke Nukem (Score:5, Funny)
North Carolina lost bomb (Score:5, Informative)
Big Concern (Score:5, Informative)
It should be retrieved. If this were a modern fission-fusion-fission bomb, it wouldn't be a concern. The Air Force says it doesn't have the fission trigger installed, so with a modern device that means you don't have a bomb. You need a fission bomb to ignite the lithium deuteride in the fusion stage, and you need the neutrons from the fusion stage to fission the U-238 jacket. So, again, no primary, no bomb. Leave it there, rivers already feed natural uranium into the oceans at a rate of 3.2x10^4 tons every year.
But this isn't a modern bomb, it was a transitional device between the earliest, liquid-dueterium monsters and modern three-stage designs. They weren't yet sure how to achieve efficient compression of the fusion stage, so they wrapped the bomb in highly-enriched uranium to be sure the fusion stage would light off. The bomb had a design yield of 1.7 megatons, and something like 1.3 megatons of that would be due to the fission of the U-235 jacket.
That means that this bomb contains a lot of almost-weapons-grade uranium. Again, 1.3 megatons of yield from the fission of uranium. The largest pure-fission bomb we ever detonated was the 500-kiloton Mark 18 prototype, and that used about 60 kilograms of HEU. Assuming linear scaling, that means we're looking at upwards of 156 kilograms of HEU in this bomb. Critical mass of uranium's about 16 kilograms. Double that to overengineer a bomb, and that means whoever gets their mitts on this thing could build 4 or 5 crude Hiroshima-type bombs, each with a yield of several kilotons.
That's bad. They need to retrive this thing, even if there's a risk they blow it up in situ. I'd rather have some of this stuff scattered in an unusable form offshore than have Mohammed and his band of Merry Pranksters get their hands on 4 or 5 cities' worth of U-235.
Re:Big Concern (Score:5, Insightful)
Let us not forget the home-grown nutcases and whack-jobs of the ilk of McVeigh, Koresh and Kaczynski (?sp). But heck, the Americans would probably invade Iran (or whoever is next on the Axis of Terror) if the IRA admitted igniting the damn thing.
Re:Big Concern (Score:3, Insightful)
Name me a major terrorist attack since the OKC bombing that was not carried out by Islamic extremists.
there are enough home grown idiots with grudges against the government to go out there with the bass-boat, a winch and a case or two of beer.
If two good-ol' boys with a bass boat and a winch can manage to excavate a 7,000 bomb buried under decades worth of sediment, the Terr
On behalf of the East Coast: (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you,
A Concerned North Carolina Resident
the treasure hunt is on! (Score:5, Informative)
WEAPONS LOST/MISSING
March 10, 1956, Over the Mediterranean Sea
July 28, 1957, Over the Atlantic Ocean - somewhere between Dover Air Force Base (Delaware) and Atlantic City, New Jersey
February 5, 1958, Savannah River, Georgia (this story)
September 25, 1959, Off Whidbey Island [southwhidbey.com], Washington. Since this is slashdot, I feel obligated to point out that this is about 30 miles from Redmond [microsoft.com].
January 24, 1961, Goldsboro, North Carolina [ibiblio.org]
December 5, 1965, Aboard the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) in the Pacific Ocean (only miles from the Japanese island chain of Ryukyu)
Spring 1968, Aboard the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in the Atlantic Ocean - 400-500 miles southwest of the Azores.
Any slashdotters have a geiger counter, a boat, and some free time?
Plutonium Trigger (Score:3, Informative)
Hurricane (Score:4, Interesting)
I know! I know! (Score:5, Funny)
LICK IT! LICK IT!
if it isn't the bomb (Score:4, Funny)
And if it isn't the bomb, the question now is "WTF?!"
Complete list of nuclear accidents (Score:3, Informative)
List here [wikipedia.org]
I especially like the one they dropped in a farmers field but they couldn't dig it up so they bought the field.
Also kinda scary that Rocky Flats [wikipedia.org] which has had it's share of disasters is pretty much in my backyard.
-Mikey P
Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps more disturbing is that whenever someone gets the description of the anatomy and physiology almost right - but not quite right - (as if they're still working on it), someone else comes along to merrily correct them. I'm curious now - given the materials necessary, how many slashdotters could construct a working nuclear weapon?
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
All that information is openly available in books and science magazines. The real secret is in exact knowledge of how to do things, not in the principle how things should be working. For example, the physicists knew how to make the bomb before the Manhattan Project started; and it took years and billions of dollars to actually make it work.
I'm curious now - given the materials necessary, how many slashdotters could construct a working nuclear weapon?
Probably everyone could do so. The real question would be "how close to the optimum yield you will get?" - because the easiest way to make a bomb would be to take two pieces of uranium in two hands, and to bring them together as fast as you can. This will result in -some- explosion, but not very powerful one. The secret is in how you assemble the critical mass in under microseconds, and those who know won't tell.
Would they thank you? (Score:5, Funny)
Give it to Saddam, to justify the war in Iraq.
Re:Get Rid Of It (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, the mosque in my community is an arab group.
Let's keep the racial bigotry, subconcious or not, to a minimum.
OT: agreed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, folks, let's not judge or label a group by the loonies who attach themselves to it. That's the same sort of stupid reasoning Rob Enderle has against Linux, isn't it?
The grandparent should have used "terrorist," a behavioral label, rather than implying some ethnic group = terrorist.
Re:OT: agreed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wise words. Unfortunately no one will listen. One person I know who follows that creed still finds it all too easy to blame the entire "Christian Right" for the acts of a few loonies at abortion clinics. Hypocrisy is the lifeblood of intolerance...
Still (Score:4, Insightful)
But there is still the problem that most likely this thing would be difficult to recover. Its not like jumping into the deep end of the pool and retrieving a plastic toy that sunk down there.
Re:Clearly a job for A.L.V.I.N. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:first things first (Score:5, Funny)
Utah [sco.com] would be a good spot.
Re: Boom? (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't know in detail how a hydrogen bomb is constructed, but roughly the process goes like:
Igniting conventional high-explosives (400 pounds here) compresses uranium enough to trigger a (relatively small, but what's small in this context) thermonuclear explosion. That thermonuclear explosion in turn causes 'heavy water' to go into a far more powerful (secondary) nuclear explosion.
It's not easy to cause this whole sequence. So don't worry, any su
Re:No worrys. (Score:5, Informative)
Steaming pile of bullshit. I swear, if the subject has the word "nuclear" in it, Slashdot's about as reliable as the Weekly World News.
The isotope of plutonium used in nuclear weapons is Pu-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years. After 5 years, almost all of the Pu-239 in a nuclear weapon will still be Pu-239.
In addition the Mark 15 Mod 0's an odd bomb.
Modern thermonuclear weapons are three-stage devices. There's a small fission trigger, whose yield is boosted by tritium injection. The radiation from the trigger ignites fusion in a second stage of lithium deuteride. Then the neutrons coming off of the fusion stage can be used to fission the bomb's tamper, made of uranium-238. U-238 won't sustain a chain reaction, but it'll fission merrily if you bombard it with fast neutrons. So, basically the boosted primary accounts for a minority of the weapon's yield, and the second stage, the fusion segment, accounts for the majority. But you can design things so that the majority of the yield comes from fission of the U-238 tamper.
The Mark 15's kind of an inversion of this. It was an early fusion bomb, back when they were still using liquid deuterium in some designs. In the Mark 15 Mod 0, the third stage is the bomb's casing, which is made of highly-enriched uranium, almost pure U-235.
Yes, the bomb's casing is almost-weapons-grade uranium. By making the case out of HEU, they didn't need to worry so much about efficient compression of the fusion stage, because the fissioning of that huge amount of HEU would send the whole thing thermonyclear. Inefficient, sure, but they hadn't quite figured everything out yet.
That's why this bomb's a concern. According to the Air Force, the primary, the 'pit,' wasn't placed in the bomb, so the primary can't detonate. Even if they're bullshitting, the twin traumas of impact and age have probably so screwed up the internals of the bomb that the only detonation possible would be low-order, a fizzle, biggest problem would be the environmental effects of scattering that much radioactive material into the river.
So that's not the concern. The concern is that whoever recovers it now has his hands on well over a ton of weapons-grade uranium, easily enough to make not one, but several crude Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs. I mean, this was a bomb that had a total yield of 1.7 megatons, and 1.3 megatons of that came from fission. That's a lot of U-235.
This was the device tested as Castle Nectar.
Well Said (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'd like to mention, however, is that there is another concern: The bomb is sitting above a fresh-water aquifer used by the nearby town. As, according to another source I read, the barrier between this device and the aquifer is only a (thick) layer of clay, I would imagine that there has already been some level of contamination to the drinking water. As the bomb settles and slowly sinks, likely being more dense than the surrounding clay, the contamination levels will rise.
The hard part, and the most expensive aspect to the retreival situation, is that a crew would have to retrieve the bomb without collapsing the aquifer roof and using equipment that would prevent radiation poisoning of the retrieval crew. Add to that the fact that the bomb is under twenty feet of silt, and you have a very tricky situation. You can't just build a four-sided dam to keep the water out--like those used to construct bridge pylons--and it would take some very specialized and delicate equipment to remove enough silt to retrieve the bomb without spreading contaminated silt everywhere.
It's a difficult situation, to say the least. The good news is that there few sea-floor excavation vehicles capable of retrieving the bomb, even without the contamination issue, and that an excavation going on in that area, now that the (supposed) find has been publicized, will draw a huge amount of suspicion. Due to the weight of the bomb itself and the sheer volume of silt required to be removed before the bomb could even be reached, it wouldn't exactly be an overnight job. The threat of terrorists digging up a piece of the bomb is, therefore, less than the threat of terrorists getting their hands on a seperate source of radioactive materials and building an atomic bomb.
[Hopefully, I'm not spreading bad information, myself, now.]
~UP
Re:No worrys. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No worrys. (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No worrys. (Score:3, Informative)
Bad estimate. In Ivy King, 60 kilograms of HEU yielded 500 kilotons, so this one's probably around 150, 200 kilograms. Something like that.
Re:What to do? (Score:4, Interesting)
At this point, I'd be happy with them disposing of the radioisotopes in a safe mannor, then blowing the rest of the bomb. Hopefully not enough of the radiation has leaked into the environment to still allow this to be possible.
It should be a matter of National Security to secure the radioisotopes from this weapon. Since they practically broadcasted the location of the weapon, and the fact that a nuclear weapon on the bottom of the ocean is still viable as a dirty bomb, the question is, how long will it to be until a terrorist organization or a country with enough balls goes looking for one of these bombs? I'm not too worried, but I'm just tired of the government hiding things like this from us.
Re:Can't help but wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
It's been known for a long time that it's been missing...like, since the plane carrying it dropped it. The problem has always been that they were never able to locate it; granted the Government only searched for it for 9 weeks immediately after the incident. You'd think with our current technology the military would have been able to find it now. In 2001, the Air Force conducted a study where they claim the safes