Question...did it ever go by train?

Don't think so... Assembled at military plant, transported by military planes.

Maybe the uranium ore came out by rail....who knows?

The articale simply implies this was a simple fission bomb. No word on fusion bombs, though.
 
kws4000 said:
Don't think so... Assembled at military plant, transported by military planes.

Maybe the uranium ore came out by rail....who knows?

The articale simply implies this was a simple fission bomb. No word on fusion bombs, though.
Click to expand...

A 9MT bomb (which is what the B-53 was) cannot by definition be a fission device. Fission only gets you up to about 200kT unboosted, and that would be a giant bomb, you can 'simply' add tritium to boost that to around 400-500kT but by this point you're no longer a 'simple fission bomb'. To get beyond that you're looking at a 2 or 3 stage fusion weapon (stage 1 in a fusion weapon will always be a fission device since you need the overpressure generated by a fission bomb to trigger a fusion reaction).

IIRC the B-53 was a direct result of the Castle Bravo 'overly sucessful' (designed to be 6MT, actually 15MT) design, and as such is a 2 stage teller-ulam design. Later fusion weapons were smaller because they utilised a 3rd stage rather than relying on cramming LOTS of lithium deuteride (and polystyrene) into a big case.

But to bring things back on topic, yeah, they'd be transported by air, mostly likely wherever they were assembled (Pantex?) would have had an airstrip and they'd be no need for any rail transport.
 
There was a show of the history channel a while back showing how they tested the containers used for transport. One sequence was running a loco into it at a pretty big clip. I've read a lot are transported by 18-wheeler. Looks like any other truck but lotsa secret survailance nearby. The logo on the side certainly doesn't say "Nukes-R-Us", lol.

I knew a Navy Capt (since deceased) who was associated in some way with the Castle Bravo test. He said there were a heck of a lot of surprised folks when it cooked off at such an unexpectedly high yield (lotta engineers and physists running for thier slide rulers too I bet, lol).

Ben
 
For the paranoid, load nuke bombs on two trains and run them head on into each other at a combined speed of 300 mph, what you would get is chunks and particles of radioactive material scattered over a few square miles that would need to be cleaned up. No Armageddon. To trigger the nuclear explosion requires conventional explosives going off in an exact sequence timed in milliseconds, precisely calculated shaped charges that must be aligned exactly to work at all. Give a nuke warhead a few good whacks with a 20 pound sledge hammer and you'll disable it. That's why they use electronic triggers and radar altimeters, smacking it into the ground would merely set off a conventional explosion that would scatter the uranium or plutonium without the thermonuclear reaction.
 
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sniper297 said:
To trigger the nuclear explosion requires conventional explosives going off in an exact sequence timed in milliseconds
Click to expand...

If it was only that lax timing then it would have been much easier to develop the bomb. As I recall the window for detonating each plate in a spherical charge trigger is around 100nS, and even requires that the wires running from the electronics to the charges, be within mm of each other length wise, otherwise the speed of electricity in a wire becomes a problem with the charges being synchronised enough to form the right pressure wave on the pit.

The complexity of getting all of that right is why they struggled with the spherical trigger method for so long during the Manhatten project, and why the first bomb was the 'known to work reliably' 'gun barrel' design of the "Little Boy" weapon.

It's also interesting to note that the accuracy of the detonation synchronisation is how most of the early Permissive Action Links worked - when the code wheels were in the incorrect position, some of the electrical circles to the high explosive would have a few meters of (coiled and sealed inside the epoxy block) wire insterted, which would mean that the weapon would fail to achieve a consistant pressure pattern, and thus only really have the few pounds of explosive as the output yield. (Later PALs use a more complex system to block ANY explosion, conventional or otherwise when the PAL isn't set to the right code)

That's why they use electronic triggers and radar altimeters, smacking it into the ground would merely set off a conventional explosion that would scatter the uranium or plutonium without the thermonuclear reaction.
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Even (most) high explosive doesn't usually go off if you just smack it into the ground, so the 'conventional explosive blast' is really the 'worst case' scenario for an occidentally dropped nuclear weapon that hasn't been armed and set with a trigger altitude. 95% of the time it would just sink itself into the ground and do nothing, as witnessed by the Tybee bomb loss in Georgia and many other accidental bomb losses by the USAF. Out of the dozens of times the US has accidently dropped nukes, only a couple even resulted in the high explosives going off, and none with the nuclear reaction occurring.
 
Sniper 296:
I certainly agree with you 100% no nuclear explosion but from what the show on the Discovery Channel said the transport containers would almost certainly survive even that big of a crash.

NikkiA:

Agree with that too as it isn't in a transport container when being transported in a plane. Be a mess to clean up but doable.

I've read you can light C-4 with a match and heat up a can of soup with it (a terrible waste of a perfectly good explosive). Guess it depends on how hungry you are, lol.

Ben
 
For me, it is difficult to conceptualize 9 megatons of power.

I think that equals 18 Millions pounds of explosives.

During the 60's I was in the USAF and stationed at a base located on the West Coast of USA.

That base had a B52 bomb wing and they would be landing and taking off in, I think, 12 hour cycles.

Also, that base was the West Coast nuclear storage facility for the USAF.

I never knew that so much destructive power was about 7 miles away from where I was sleeping.

Regards,
 
NikkiA said:
If it was only that lax timing then it would have been much easier to develop the bomb. As I recall the window for detonating each plate in a spherical charge trigger is around 100nS, and even requires that the wires running from the electronics to the charges, be within mm of each other length wise, otherwise the speed of electricity in a wire becomes a problem with the charges being synchronised enough to form the right pressure wave on the pit.

The complexity of getting all of that right is why they struggled with the spherical trigger method for so long during the Manhatten project, and why the first bomb was the 'known to work reliably' 'gun barrel' design of the "Little Boy" weapon.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, well explained by Tom Clancy in "The Sum of all Fears".

I thought it was fission because the article specified the sphere of material, but I forgot...;)
 
9 Mt is 18 billion pounds of TNT.

Think the bomb in The Sum of All Fears was originally a fission device but the guy that re-did it tried to convert it into a small fusion weapon (theres an oxymoron for you) - no such thing as a "small" fusion device, lol.

The Soviets tried to make a 100 MT device but it only cooked off at something between 50 and 60 MT. Thing was the size of a boxcar and the only plane that could carry it couldn't fly faster then 400 MPH when carrying it. Would have made a nice target.

The solution to higher yield is a matter/antimatter device but anti-matter is tricky to make and even trickier to store. Would give 100% of matter to energy conversion tho. I've read even fusion devices are quite in-efficient - less then 10%.

What can you possibly need that much kaboom for, lol?

Ben
 
Hee-hee, love Tom Clancy but it took me a while to get over the initial shock. :eek: I was an Aviation AntiSubmarine Warfare Tech, top secret clearance, burn before reading commit suicide after reading stuff suddenly revealed to anyone with the money to buy a book just a few years after I got out of the Navy?! Manuals locked in classified storage safes, radiation badges and sidearms worn at all times when prepping, loading, and arming the low yield nuke tipped torpedoes, never ever ever talk about anything to anybody, and just 3 years later reading all the secret technical details in spy novels - never heard a word about any of it being declassified, so it came as a big shock to me. I guess the cold war is over now, who won? :hehe:
 
aardvark1 said:
I never knew that so much destructive power was about 7 miles away from where I was sleeping.
Click to expand...

I know what you mean. When I was happily married, I never knew that there was so much destructive power right next to me when I was sleeping!:hehe:
 
I made 2 versions of the 4-bogey NASA cars that transported the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle. Are on the DLS. Search using NASA as the name or description should turn them up. They are interactive for the containers that held the boosters. Gotta agree with enkidoh as these cars under the right circumstances are bombs.

Ben.
 
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