We’ll regret doing this when the aliens land.
This may be the break the McCain campaign has been waiting for!
So when the killer asteroid comes a calling, we’ll have no space shuttle * and * no massive nukes. Well, we’re boned.
Luckily, we can just duct tape seven or eight B83s together if we really need to. Unless they just snap together like Legos?
Tends to be velcro these days. The Russians just nail theirs together though.
Mr. President, we cannot allow there to be a Bomb Nailing Gap!
The press release from NNSA on this crossed my desk this week.
9 megatons is a big damned bomb – the plan was to try to crush underground bunkers by brute force, even if we couldn’t hit them or weren’t sure exactly where they were.
There was a larger bomb in the American arsenal, apparently – one version of the B41 allegedly was expected to produce a 25 MT yield.
This sort of thing gives me the willies.
edit: the NNSA link I posted has a Youtube video of them dropping the damned thing, although it’s an inactive dummy of some kind (no boom).
I just figured out what that blunt, fat bomb shape reminds me of – cartoonist Herblock’s recurring “character” representing the atomic bomb as an unshaven brute. Example here.
I believe we are going to a more “accurately aimed” model rather thatn the “big hammer” approach. The more precisely we can deliver the device, the less powerful it needs to be.
In order to destroy underground bunkers you really really want to penetrate into the earth so that you can couple the shock to the ground. With something like a 10m penetration you can decrease the required yield of the bomb by something like two orders of magnitude (numbers may be off, I haven’t looked at them in a bit). The main issue with bunker defeat, then, is designing weapons that can survive the deceleration of impact rather than increasing the yield high enough.