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US accelerates plans for nuke 24 times more powerful than Hiroshima bomb amid WWIII fears
Daily Mail UK ^ | April 08, 2025 | Staff

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 ...


TOPICS: Government; History; Military/Veterans; Politics
KEYWORDS: b6113; clickbaitadspam; concerntrolling; fakenews; gravitybomb; tds
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To: Red Badger; All

That’s nothing. Tsar Bomba was 50 Megatons!!


21 posted on 04/08/2025 9:00:28 PM PDT by cowboyusa
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To: Red Badger

Where’s the news?

Ivy Mike (1952) was 650-times more powerful than Little Boy.


22 posted on 04/08/2025 9:02:54 PM PDT by Paal Gulli
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To: Red Badger

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.


23 posted on 04/08/2025 9:02:57 PM PDT by eyedigress (Trump is my President!)
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To: Red Badger

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.


24 posted on 04/08/2025 9:05:26 PM PDT by katana
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To: Red Badger

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.


25 posted on 04/08/2025 9:10:02 PM PDT by Paal Gulli
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To: Drago

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.


26 posted on 04/08/2025 9:19:38 PM PDT by 17th Miss Regt (Fascist, deplorable, and proud of it!)
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To: Red Badger

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.


27 posted on 04/08/2025 9:24:36 PM PDT by lefty-lie-spy (Stay Metal)
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To: SaveFerris

Broken Arrow


28 posted on 04/08/2025 9:26:58 PM PDT by MikeSteelBe (The South will be in the right in the next war of Northern aggression.)
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To: tumblindice

and a Cool Buzz.
.
Spicolli


29 posted on 04/08/2025 9:28:05 PM PDT by Big Red Badger (ALL Things Will be Revealed !)
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To: MikeSteelBe

Vee Haff a Vinner!!!!!!


30 posted on 04/08/2025 9:28:39 PM PDT by SaveFerris (Luke 17:28 ... as it was in the Days of Lot; They did Eat, They Drank, They Bought, They Sold ......)
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To: Red Badger

Why are we downsizing?


31 posted on 04/08/2025 9:28:56 PM PDT by Az Joe (We can't spare President Trump; He fights!)
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To: Red Badger

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.


32 posted on 04/08/2025 9:40:57 PM PDT by know.your.why
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To: Red Badger
Gravity bombs are literally what they sound like, a bomb dropped from a military plane

Mans you have to fly close enough to use it. Seems a missile is more likely to get to a target.

33 posted on 04/08/2025 9:49:31 PM PDT by McGruff (Biden will go down in history as the worst president ever.)
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To: Red Badger

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.


34 posted on 04/08/2025 9:50:09 PM PDT by DesertRhino (2016 Star Wars, 2020 The Empire Strikes Back, 2025... RETURN OF THE JEDI...)
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To: sonova

That is Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove”. Good movie.


35 posted on 04/08/2025 9:52:55 PM PDT by laplata (They want each crisis to take the greatest toll possible.)
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To: tumblindice

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


36 posted on 04/08/2025 9:56:47 PM PDT by DesertRhino (2016 Star Wars, 2020 The Empire Strikes Back, 2025... RETURN OF THE JEDI...)
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To: sonova

“Those earmuffs aren’t gonna help!”

LOL... nice catch.


37 posted on 04/08/2025 9:59:47 PM PDT by DesertRhino (2016 Star Wars, 2020 The Empire Strikes Back, 2025... RETURN OF THE JEDI...)
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To: Red Badger

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.


38 posted on 04/08/2025 10:03:03 PM PDT by Getready (Wisdom is more valuable than gold and harder to find. )
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To: tumblindice
Visibility: The fireball would be visible from almost 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away.

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,

39 posted on 04/08/2025 11:07:47 PM PDT by alexander_busek (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.)
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To: 17th Miss Regt

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”.


40 posted on 04/09/2025 12:23:20 AM PDT by Paul R. (Old Viking saying: "Never be more than 3 steps away from your weapon ... or a Uriah Heep song!" ;-))
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