Yes, I know everybody’s freaked out over Iran and North Korea, but I’m wondering if anyone has atom bombs laying around in some storage facility. To my understanding, they aren’t anyone’s favorite use of weapon and I can’t imagine they’re produced as much as modern nuclear weapons, but it stands to reason that the US might have a few in case, say, Russia went nuts and decided to attack us. So my question is this: how many ready-to-use atom bombs exist in the world, where are they, and what countries have them?
Are you thinking of “atom bombs” as fission weapons, and “nuclear bombs” as fusion weapons? Otherwise I’m not sure I’m following the question.
There are somewhere around 25,000 to 30,000 warheads which use uranium or plutonium in the world, all but many hundreds are owned by the US and Russia. Most of them are not operationally deployed. According to the SORT treaty, the US and Russia are each supposed to have 2,200 deployed nuclear warheads by 2012, though the treaty isn’t really binding. The rest owned by the US and Russia are in some sort of storage, maintenance, or awaiting destruction. Does that help?
Would you accept a wiki link?
I believe that the exact physical locations of weapons is going to be a classified data point.
(The USN, for example, has a “neither confirm nor deny” policy on the presence of these things on it’s ships or bases.)
Sorry, I should have clarified. I was talking specifically about the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We figured out how to make them, beat Japan… but what happened to them? Did we only make the ones dropped on Japan? Surely we had a few as a backup. Moreover, what happened to the ones that Russia claimed to have? I know there are thousands of nuclear warheads around, but I’m specifically referring to the ones that annihilated Japan.
They were made one at a time. The first one, the prototype, was tested in New Mexico (Trinity). The second was used at Hiroshima and the third at Nagasaki. Other bombs were made later - some detonated in tests, others stockpiled until they became obsolescent.
There were no backups. If Japan hadn’t surrendered after Nagaskai, the U.S. wouldn’t have had another bomb ready for several months.
Why would you think the U.S. (or any other nuclear power) would continue to produce bombs from a World War 2 design when the technology developed to make more reliable, more efficient, more powerful bombs?
I am seriously not following this question unlike any other in recent memory. The U.S. is nuclear ready on a few minutes notice with thousands of nuclear weapons ready to be launched from locations all over the U.S. mainland, bases overseas, as well as nuclear submarines deployed everywhere from Arctic pack ice to strategic locations around the globe. The President of the United States has a military officer following him around at every single moment with a “nuclear football” that contains the nuclear launch strategies as and he also has that days nuclear launch codes within reach at all times.
I am almost convinced that we misread the question but this sentence makes me think that something has been lost in communication within your OP.
"but it stands to reason that the US might have a few in case, say, Russia went nuts and decided to attack us."
I am not sure where the part about old-school bombs figures into something about modern attacks from Russia. We have much better nuclear weapons than that now (thousands of them as a matter of fact on constant guard at every single moment).
Nope, no backups. IIRC it was a 6th month delay or so before the U.S. was able to manufacture enough fuel to make another bomb.
As to the fate of early nukes, there are two likely outcomes. Either they were exploded as tests, or decommissioned. The fuel was almost certainly used in the next generation of nuclear weapons. It’s incredibly difficult, and incredibly expensive to manufacture fuel for nuclear weapons. If not used in weapons the fuel would have wound up in a nuclear power plant, though this is unlikely for early atomic weapons.
I still can’t quite figure out if you’re talking about the current stockpile of nuclear weapons or the stockpile immediately after WW2. WRT our development of nuclear weapons, see wiki for a list of the bombs we’ve produced and the years in which we had them in our inventory.
Further down the same article you’ll see Soviet/Russian nuclear weapons, but I’m at a loss to think of what you mean by the “ones that Russia claimed to have.” Over the past 5 decades, Russia built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and thankfully many have been dismantled, with the help of the Nunn-Lugar program. But if you mean the bombs Russia “claimed to have” immediately after WW2, you’re mistaken, because the USSR got the bomb in 1949.
As far as a year-by-year breakdown of how many nuclear weapons there were in the world at any given time, see this chart.
I’m pretty sure he’s referring to a good, old-fashioned, “fly the plane over and let 'er drop” atomic bomb.
I have no idea what became of them (if any were made besides the two we used) but that’s my guess regarding the OP. I assume there is some subtle difference between an “atomic bomb” and today’s “nuclear weapon”?
I read and reread and I came to roughly the same conclusion as you however I have no idea whatsoever why that type of bomb would be important from an attack from modern day Russia or anywhere else as stated in the OP. We have more than enough nuclear bombs ready at all times so I am not sure why a Hiroshima bomb would factor into anything. Plus, the Enola Gay would take a while to get pressed into service and I think that most countries would be paranoid seeing her lumber over their country hindsight being 20/20 after all.
That was the question I was asking. I know they aren’t as powerful as current weapons. I wasn’t suggesting that they were. I was just wondering what HAPPENED to the old ones that prompted the original mushroom clouds and whatnot. I was asking if they made more than just the ones they dropped on Japan - and I’m actually kind of surprised that they didn’t. What if Japan hadn’t surrended and gotten hold of a nuclear bomb sometime in the next sixth months? We would have been sitting ducks?
With regard to Russia, I’m not sure of the date of the test, but I think it was called RDS-1. It was in the 40’s and it was a very similar bomb to the one we detonated on Japan. If the answer is that they too made them one-by-one, and therefore there were no leftovers, that answers my question. I guess I was envisioning them (and the US) being a little more cautious and making a few in case the first ones a) didn’t work or b) failed to cause the desired outcome.
My wording was inferior, then, I apologize. I meant if Russia had decided to attack us in that time period. They tested a similar bomb in the late 40’s, which I’m sure was a little unnerving.
Accounts of this vary. More recently I’ve heard that we would have had at least 2 or 3 more ready to go in a month. Had Japan not surrendered the invasion of the mainland, which was scheduled for early '46, would probably have included the use of a half dozen or so nuclear bombs along with conventional forces.
I think what the OP is asking is whether we still have any of these old, original design bombs lying around and the answer would be no. The were dismantled and their valuable Uranium and/or Plutonium cores were used in newer, more effectively designed weapons. This would have happened long ago (the late 40s/early 50s). In fact, the Hiroshima models (the Uranium ‘gun-type’ weapons) were dismantled almost immediately after the war ended because they were an incredibly unsafe design highly prone to possible accidental detonation. They were also very inefficient and less powerful.
The whys and hows of this are much too complex to go into here. I suggest you read ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ by Richard Rhodes - an excellent overview of the American atomic bomb program, with a look at the Russian one as well. The basic answer is the first nuclear bombs were unique, hand-produced, one-of-a-kind items, and we had no mass production ability to make them any faster than we did. (It wouldn’t have mattered. Japan was already in bad shape economically and militarily and we still had our regular armies. They wouldn’t have had six months; Allied plans for a land invasion were still in place and would have gone through if no surrender had been forthcoming)
And, it would not have been six months. Per the Rhodes book, General Groves had reported he had another nuclear assembly ready to ship to Tinian on August 12 or 13th, with a bomb assembled on Tinian and ready to drop by August 17 or 18. (Page 743 of the large softcover edition). So a third bomb was expected to be available and ready to drop very shortly.
At the time, there was no chance of any other country making one; the American program was far, far ahead of the Russian one. (The first Russian bomb was basically a direct copy of the Trinity bomb, its development largely due to information obtained from key Russian spies in the US, particularly Klaus Fuchs)
‘Dark Sun, The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb’, also by Richard Rhodes, is another excellent read examining the Russian and American atomic programs after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As noted upthread, the U.S. used them as fast as they made them. The original atomic bombs were hand-built – there was no assmebly line. The process for enriching uranium (Trinity and Hiroshima) or producing plutonium was just one step beyond a laboratory experiment.
IF Japan could have put together an atomic bomb and IF they had a method to deliver it somewhere, we would, indeed, have been sitting ducks. But they didn’t have a program, there weren’t any spare bombs lying around anywhere to be sold to the highest bidder, and Japanese offensive capabilities were pretty much gone by then anyway.
The Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. Of course both countries began stockpiling bombs, warheads, etc. as soon as they could produce them in volume.
It wasn’t that we chose not to make more, it is that in the early days of the nuclear age, one could say that atomic bombs were made by craftsmen because nuclear bomb factories simply didn’t exist yet - we couldn’t just decide to make more because a huge effort was needed just to make a few. See the chart I linked to: it took 5 years for the US inventory to go from 2 bombs to 170, but then five years later, once the processes were established, we went from 170 to 1,703. Russia had a similar learning curve.
Although the original production of weapons was a research program, it was not the end of military bomb production. By the 1950’s many gravity bombs were in deployment and on alert. How long it was between the Hiroshima attack, and the first bomb to roll off the production line is not a widely disseminated fact, but it was certainly a matter of only a very few years.
By the middle of the 1950’s the nuclear arsenal was a matter of hundreds of bomb, and the first missile launched nuclear weapons were under development, at the least. By the 1960’s submarine and missile weapons with nuclear warheads were deployed worldwide, with “theater” weapons ready to issue to army field commanders. Thousands of weapons were available, already built, and stored in military bases.
Regular maintenance on these weapons included reclaiming nuclear material as older designs became obsolete, and reusing the fissile materials for newer bomb designs. By the 1970’s new designs were being implemented which allowed new warheads to be exchanged in existing weapons on a rotational cycle. The major reason for all this design attention is that there are significant engineering challenges involved in using weapons grade material for any peace time use, and the risk of “misallocation” as it is euphemistically called is enormous.
Modern nuclear designs continue to be refined, although testing is now limited to computer modeling, and confidence is somewhat degraded. Mostly, newer designs are to get weight to yield ratios as low as possible and maintenance periods as long as possible. Half life of some of the elements is also a matter of some concern. However, the “shelf life” of a modern nuclear weapon is measured in decades. When you are talking megatons, half a loaf is enough to kill millions.
There are, I am sure stockpiles of undeployed nuclear weapons in every single country with nuclear weapons. In some cases, single digit numbers, in other cases, thousands. After solving the social, international and legal aspect of eliminating them, if that should ever happen, there are huge engineering challenges that need to be met before there is any chance of a nuclear disarmed world.
Tris
For a long time, one of the main storage centers for nuclear weapons was the Seneca Army Depot in western New York. Most of the American nuclear weapons that weren’t currently deployed to active service were stored there (along with massive amounts of conventional munitions).
According to the Vol. II of the Nuclear Weapons Databook* (Cochrane, Arkin, Norris Hoenig, 1984), Los Alamos produced approximately five Little Boy and 20 Fat Man devices. The LBs were produced through February 1950 and were retired by a year later. The FMs were produced through December 1948, and were retired by July 1949. (That’s not a mistake: Fat Man was out of production and retired more than a year before Little Boy, even though fewer LBs were made. I don’t know why.)
Tris, according to this book, there’s little mystery about production weapons. The first Mark III, a production model of the FM, was made from April 1947 through April 1949, but “judged to be deficient as an operational weapon” and retired by the end of 1950. (It was to large, too heavy, too complex in fuzing, and took too long to assemble, but 120 were made.)
It goes on to say that the Mark IV (produced 3/49 - 5/51, 550 made, retired 5/53) “was the first mass-produced bomb. Conversion to industrial-scale weapon production was practically completed in 1949.”
- Why, yes, this is one of the most fascinating books in my collection.
::looks under bed:: Nope, just a sock, phew