Current Nuclear Weapons Development

bobbymike said:
Yes with a Gt nuke developed by a US/UK nuke lab collaboration under the new Earth Defense Network
www.sciencealert.com

If a Future Asteroid Threatens to Destroy Earth, Could We Stop It?

While preparing for the threat of an asteroid strike might seem like a hypothetical exercise, it's really not.
www.sciencealert.com www.sciencealert.com
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Time would be the killer. And we'd probably have to beg for materials from Russia and China. Hell, we'd probably have to beg them to build it too. And if it was scheduled to hit the Western Hemisphere would they do it?
 
sferrin said:
Time would be the killer. And we'd probably have to beg for materials from Russia and China. Hell, we'd probably have to beg them to build it too. And if it was scheduled to hit the Western Hemisphere would they do it?
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Why to all those statements? It’s not like the US has a lack of stored warheads, physics packages from disassembled weapons, and complete pits and other fissionable material from fully disassembled physics packages. There are still far over five thousand warheads in US inventory, including a handful of B53 physics packages explicitly reserved for planetary defense.

More over the US likely has access to the rockets with the greatest throw weight and the fastest turnover.
 
Josh_TN said:
and complete pits and other fissionable material from fully disassembled physics packages.
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While we hear, relatively speaking, a lot about the primaries pits we here almost about the secondaries from dismantled TN warhead which are IIRC stored at the Y-12 plant in Tennessee.
 
NMaude said:
While we hear, relatively speaking, a lot about the primaries pits we here almost about the secondaries from dismantled TN warhead which are IIRC stored at the Y-12 plant in Tennessee.
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Tritium secondaries do age out over time (fairly quickly at that) so need to be remanufactured every so often. IIRC something like every 10 years, if it's like the tritium night sights for a firearm.


bobbymike said:
www.thedrive.com

B-2 Spirit Now Operational With New B61-12 Nuclear Bombs

B-2 stealth bombers have become the first aircraft ready to employ the advanced B61-12 nuclear bomb in combat.
www.thedrive.com www.thedrive.com
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JDAM nukes, gotta love it.

The idea of a high yield precision nuke is less scary than a low yield precision warhead. "It's only a 5kt boom, and we are going to put it right on the target," results in a lower mental threshold for use of nukes.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Tritium secondaries do age out over time (fairly quickly at that) so need to be remanufactured every so often. IIRC something like every 10 years, if it's like the tritium night sights for a firearm.
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You're confusing the DT-boost reservoirs used in hollow-boosting the primary with the secondary, the secondaries don't use Tritium in their fusion charges just Deuterium chemically combined with Lithium-6.
 
NMaude said:
You're confusing the DT-boost reservoirs used in hollow-boosting the primary with the secondary, the secondaries don't use Tritium in their fusion charges just Deuterium chemically combined with Lithium-6.
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Ah, yeah, LiD is a different thing entirely. Pretty sure those don't age out, deuterium and 6Li are stable.
 
bobbymike said:
www.defensenews.com

The Air Force pushes off the start of its E-4B ‘Doomsday Plane’ replacement program

Plans to release a request for proposals in 2020 have been delayed.
www.defensenews.com www.defensenews.com
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Boeing bails out (not wanting a fixed term contract) :

news.yahoo.com

Exclusive-Boeing eliminated from US Air Force's 'Doomsday Plane' competition

The U.S. Air Force has eliminated Boeing from its competition to develop a successor to the E-4B Nightwatch, Boeing confirmed on Friday, shaking up the battle to build the next version of the aircraft known as the "Doomsday Plane" due to its ability to survive a nuclear war. The move leaves...
news.yahoo.com news.yahoo.com

Sierra Nevada would be the only one left bidding (officially).

@Admin: I haven't found any dedicated thread for this.
 
sferrin said:
Time would be the killer. And we'd probably have to beg for materials from Russia and China. Hell, we'd probably have to beg them to build it too. And if it was scheduled to hit the Western Hemisphere would they do it?
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Remind me who has the space observatory in the L2 point again?

If it were going to hit them, would America do anything? That's the real question.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Remind me who has the space observatory in the L2 point again?

If it were going to hit them, would America do anything? That's the real question.
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It seems doubtful Web has any capacity for spotting such; it’s a sniper scope when you need a red dot sight in astronomical terms.

As for stopping an asteroid, I would expect everyone capable of such to make their preparations regardless of impact site. It is hard to imagine any object that could cause damage across a wide enough area to severely impact an entire country wouldn’t also have global climatic consequences. A hit would most likely hit water or sparsely populated areas, statistically, but depending on size that might not be especially relevant.
 
Josh_TN said:
It seems doubtful Web has any capacity for spotting such; it’s a sniper scope when you need a red dot sight in astronomical terms.
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I meant attacking the asteroid, sorry. The giant observatory in L2 is merely an example of America's outsize performance in SLVs.
 
The October 2023 bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission’s report contained two important insights concerning the implications of China’s nuclear weapons buildup: 1) the United States will soon be threatened not by “one, but two nuclear peer adversaries, each with ambitions to change the international status quo, by force,” and 2) that China will achieve “…rough quantitative parity with the United States in deployed nuclear warheads by the mid-2030s.” Unfortunately, the situation is likely even worse. On August 12, 2021, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command Admiral Charles Richard summed it up: “We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China….The explosive growth in their nuclear and conventional forces can only be what I described as breathtaking.”

The Commission’s assessment of the 2027-2035 Chinese nuclear threat, while better than any published Pentagon assessment in decades, is still based upon flawed executive branch analysis. The Pentagon’s assessment of the Chinese nuclear buildup is very ominous, but it is probably substantially too low. There has been a slow recognition of this growing nuclear threat in the Pentagon reports. The October 2023 Pentagon report on Chinese military power, published after the Commission report (the Commission data cutoff was in May 2023), voiced increased concern about the unprecedented Chinese nuclear buildup. It revealed that China was accelerating its extensive nuclear modernization and that the Chinese nuclear weapons expansion was “on track to exceed previous projections,” which included in the 2022 Pentagon China report’s an estimate of 1,500 weapons in 2035. The Chinese nuclear warhead numbers released in the 2023 report indicated that China had “more than 500 operational nuclear warheads as of May 2023,” and that it would have “over 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030.” Counting “operational” nuclear weapons appears to have been selected in order to make the Chinese nuclear force look lower compared to that of the United States. The U.S. nuclear weapons numbers announced by the Biden Administration in 2021 included “active” (operational), inactive, and weapons awaiting dismantlement. It did not state how many “active” nuclear warheads the United States has.
 
Not to sound like a broken record (too late) but why not announce a global defense program and use it to develop new nuclear warheads and super heavy lift SRMs to carry them.
www.space.com

Could we defend Earth against a 'rubble pile' asteroid?

How do we deal with incoming space rocks that are double trouble: Bad for Earth, but also tough to deal with due to their makeup?
www.space.com www.space.com
 
So 25 W53s have been kept in reserve for planetary defence? I suppose that's for an asteroid deflection mission? Either way if this is the case then I hope they've remanufactured the warheads primaries giving them new HE-lenses.
 
Given we don't have anything to carry them
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Creating an orbital platform for basing nuclear weapons is a matter of a couple of months, during which old projects from the Cold War will be taken out of the dusty box.
This is not to mention the fact that any statements about "planetary defense against asteroids" are made for complete idiots.
 
QuadroFX said:
Creating an orbital platform for basing nuclear weapons is a matter of a couple of months, during which old projects from the Cold War will be taken out of the dusty box.
This is not to mention the fact that any statements about "planetary defense against asteroids" are made for complete idiots.
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Doing so would require renegotiating the Outer Space Treaty...

I'm leaning towards having a standing contract with SpaceX for a short order launch of a Falcon Heavy with a "special payload" already prepped. Said Special Payload being about 15klbs/7000kg.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Doing so would require renegotiating the Outer Space Treaty...

I'm leaning towards having a standing contract with SpaceX for a short order launch of a Falcon Heavy with a "special payload" already prepped. Said Special Payload being about 15klbs/7000kg.
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ATK prior to NG acquisition proposed an all solid Antares with 25k lbs to LEO
 
Scott Kenny said:
And those B53s are 8000lbs each.
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Before they were retired 20 years ago the Titan IVB would've been a good launch candidate but now it would be something like the Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, Vulcan Centaur or New Glenn.
 
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www.heritage.org

U.S. Nuclear Weapons

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Michaela Dodge, PhD To assess U.S. nuclear weapons properly, one must understand three things: their essential national security function, the growing nuclear threat posed by adversaries, and the current state of U.S. nuclear forces and their supporting infrastructure. Such...
www.heritage.org www.heritage.org
 
that article is insane. we are fueling a proxy war ON RUSSIAS BORDER AND WONDER WHY RUSSIA IS GETTING ITS HACKLES UP threatening tactical nukes and more...

and now THEY are returning the favor in the mideast and all we got is sanctimony, propaganda, and escalation. I am shocked that people like author of article above are those guiding policy! wtf???
 

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