Sometimes you also blow stuff out at escape velocity. Operation Plumbbob: Pascal-B test
You seriously need to get a skepticism implant. Ted Taylor–who developed the first compact boosted fission weapons and later went on to work on [urlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29]Project Orion, conceptualizing the compact bomblets that would have provided the fuel for Orion–indicated that the smallest design concept he had seen was compact enough to be held in someone’s hand (perhaps the size of a softball), but this would just be the core and implosion shell, not the containment, detonation package, controls, PALs, et cetera. There’s no indication that anyone ever built such a compact device and little use for it. The smallest nuclear weapon known in the US arsenal was the W-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition, basically a tactical device for asset denial. (Artillery and underwater mine versions of the device were built as well.)
Tsar Bomba had a design yield of 100MT, but actual downrated (estimated) yield was 52MT. The largest warhead in the American nuclear arsenal was the 9MT W53 warhead, used in both the B53 gravity bomb and as the warhead on the original Titan ICBM. Yields of typical warheads like the W-61 family varied from fractional kilotons to about 350kT. The W-87 on the Peacekeeper had a yield of 350-500kT.
If Teller could be said to be PNG at Los Alamos, it was mostly because he was such a gold-plated, arrogant prick. This, along with his willing and indeed eager cooperation with the security clearance reviews and HUAC investigation in which he implicated many former coworkers, including Oppenheimer, as active Communist conspirators (somehow, he missed the actual spies) made him understandibly unpopular with other nuclear physicists, as did his claim (perhaps justified, perhaps not) of being the primary creator of the ‘Super’ (thermofusion device). Teller also repeatedly advocated the use of nuclear technology in wildly inappropriate ways and offered technical advocacy for SDI schemes during the Reagan years which physicists and engineers actually working in the field considered to be pie-in-the-sky stuff. (On the other hand, Teller also contributed a great deal to the fields of computational physics methods and spectroscopy.)
Point of note: the “black conical warhead” is actually the reentry vehicle (RV), which contains the physics package, i.e. the thing that blows up. I’ve seen Mark 12A RVs handled by technicians. They use a standard chain hoist with special sling (with dual loops adjusted to keep the RV level), and just move it by hand. While operations are done with a minumum of three people (2 techs, one supervisor), it’s certainly conceivable that it could be done by a single person. (The Tridents use a Mark 4 and Mark 5 RVs which I’m unfamiliar with, but they’re probably not any larger than the Mark 12.) Anyway, I’ve seen people move 5 tons by hand with a single swing crane, so an RV weighing less than 1000lbs should be no problem.
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