What A Terrible Idea
Duncan noted a New York Times piece about a program to update hundreds of tactical nuclear bombs that were created to counter the assumed Soviet forces superiority in an attack on NATO.
These weapons shouldn’t be upgraded, they should be dismantled. First off, they don’t need to be all that accurate, they are bloody nuclear weapons. Close counts with nuclear weapons, OK? But, a potentially bigger problem is that they are small, relatively speaking, and I have lost all confidence in the ability of the current US military to keep track of nuclear weapons.
We don’t need them, so we should get rid of them to make the world safer. Even without these weapons, we still have more than enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on earth. Use the money for something more useful, like a pay raise for the troops so they don’t qualify for food stamps.
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I borrowed Rachel Maddow’s book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power from a friend, so I can’t look up the term in it right now, but she points out that at least one process essential to the refurbishing of earlier nuclear weapons has been completely lost since the days those bombs were built: for security reasons, it was never written down, and all the people who knew the process by memory either have died or cannot be located. Now doesn’t that give you confidence!
We shouldn’t be ‘refurbishing’, we should be retiring older weapons. These are surface detonation weapons which produce the most fallout, small or not. We have conventional weapons that can produce the same effect without the fallout, and are more accurate. There is no reason for them to exist, especially not in a convenient form that can be popped into the trunk of car, with lifting points built in.
Steve, my suspicion is that it was the plutonium pit that you’re thinking of. The geeks at Los Alamos were quite proud of themselves a few years back because they re-invented the processes needed to create a new plutonium pit (the inner heart of an implosion bomb). Seems that the process had been entirely lost, so they had to go back to first principles and re-invent it from scratch. At least unlike the first team to invent it, they knew it could be done, and had some models to work off of. Still, having a model to work off of is only limited help when you’re trying to invent processes to arrive at that model…
Ah yes, the glowing press release where LANL pats themselves on the back for re-inventing a 55 year old process…
Yes, but it is ‘cheaper and faster’ even if they can’t make it smaller using that high-tech process of casting … like the bullets for firelocks.