Posted on 04/08/2025 8:26:59 PM PDT by Red Badger
America's newest weapon of mass destruction is going into production seven months ahead of schedule as fears of a war with China continue to grow.
Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico are kickstarting development of the B61-13, a nuclear 'gravity bomb' that was originally slated to go into production for the US Air Force in 2026.
Gravity bombs are literally what they sound like, a bomb dropped from a military plane which lets gravity do all the work.
The timeline was moved up due to the 'critical challenge and urgent need' for a new nuclear deterrent - a threat that's hopefully big enough to discourage America's enemies from attacking first.
The B61-13 is 24 times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. That first atom bomb, called 'Little Boy,' had a yield of about 15 kilotons - the explosive equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.
The B61-13, on the other hand, is designed to have a yield of around 360 kilotons, or 360,000 tons of TNT.
This particular weapon was scheduled to become the full-time replacement for older nuclear bombs carried by US stealth bombers and dropped over targets without warning by 2028.
However, with growing economic and military tensions between the US and major powers like China and Russia, the dramatically updated timeline could put a terrifying new weapon on the battlefield by the end of this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
That’s nothing. Tsar Bomba was 50 Megatons!!
Where’s the news?
Ivy Mike (1952) was 650-times more powerful than Little Boy.
Given the rise in technology I would say Nukes is a bit of a head fake.
I was a worker in the old school. I was educated in the schematics and timing of advanced ECCM.
I would believe we are at the level of laser weapons.
That did seem to be the direction.
I’ve encountered a lot of different people in a lot of different professions over the course of my life. By far, the dumbest and laziest were journalists.
The Tsar Bomba was a 100-megaton device that they detuned for detonation because once they had it built they finally did the math and found that past a yield of 50 MT, more of the increased blast effect would be going out of the atmosphere than remaining in.
On the poster it gives a ‘radius’ figure for the B-61 of 192,000 feet, which is about 36 miles. What they did was to scale the ‘radius’ of the Little Boy by the ratio of the yields. It does not work like that. But they are journalists and therefore quite ignorant.
LOL. 489 kilotons is still a baby. A big baby, but a baby. The world has had really big bombs since the early 1950s. This is just a new upgrade to an old plan.
Broken Arrow
and a Cool Buzz.
.
Spicolli
Vee Haff a Vinner!!!!!!
Why are we downsizing?
A 1990 study by the Army estimated 5000MT total yield of all the nukes of all the nuke capable countries combined. If you use Hiroshima as a metric..ie: 15KT=100,000 dead...then 5000MT works out to 34Billion dead. Thats like 5X the worlds population. The study also estimated that it would only take a total of 10MT to destroy the USA’s ability to function as a nation/civilization. Typical city buster strategic nukes are 350KT. Tactical nukes are 50KT. Just one “tiny” 15KT Hiroshima sized nuke over a city like Chicago would create more burn victims than all the burn centers in the USA could handle. I think anyone with half a brain can conclude that if there ever really is full blown nuke exchange...pretty much everything is history and nuke winter and all that.
Mans you have to fly close enough to use it. Seems a missile is more likely to get to a target.
WHOA.... a whole 360 kilotons? That brings us up to the mid 1950s.
Amateurs talk about nuclear bomb yields as though there is a race anymore. With today’s delivery systems, they can put a warhead through a window, so giant bombs are no longer needed and are basically crude artifacts of an era where accuracy was measured in miles. The Tsar Bomba was around 50 Megatons.
The reason the Russians had the biggest bombs is because their delivery systems were so crude and inaccurate. They were very basically giant V2 rockets.
But it’s good to modernize our fleet.
That is Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove”. Good movie.
And that’s just the fireball on that 50 MT behemoth
Ground Zero Annihilation:
Everything within a 34-mile (55 km) radius of the detonation point, including buildings in the nearby village of Severny, was completely destroyed.
Extensive Damage:
Wooden houses were destroyed and brick/stone ones lost roofs, windows, and doors in districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero
“Those earmuffs aren’t gonna help!”
LOL... nice catch.
I think our biggest nukes are 2.2 megatons yield.
These new relatively smaller bombs would be adequate for destroying the civil and military infrastructure of any nation, as long as it was sent to the appropriate place.
The “hype” is probably to let our foes know....it would not be smart to use nukes...cause they will be destroyed.
Hiroshimas bomb was 20 kilotons. The b61’s are about 360 kt...18 times bigger. 20kt completely destroyed 5-7 square miles...so about 100 sq miles will be destroyed with b61.
Need about 4 of them to completely destroy l.a...but that could be easily done with Santa Ana winds with an incompetent mayor, defunded fire and police departments, and a book of matches.
Not to quibble, but at a distance of 1,000 km, a fireball - even one 8 km in diameter - would be obscured by the curvature of the Earth.
Perhaps "visibility" refers to the (reflected) flash.
Regards,
Right. That figure of 192,000 feet also makes no sense given the areas of destruction cited, also: a 192,000 ft. radius vs. an 8000 ft. radius would give you an area of destruction 576 times larger, not the more reasonable* “15x larger”.
*As if any of these horribles are “reasonable”.
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