I’ve always said this country needs more nukes and bigger ones.
Mmmmmm, tasty gamma waves.
Ummm....no biggie.... there are already bombs hugely more nasty than their atomic WW2 little brothers. Why the hype???
Being many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb is nothing new.
The original bombs were relatively small by modern standards.
Not sure how big a deal the new bombs are. Good to modernize the deterrent but don’t know if this is a key weapon.
The good thing about modern nukes is that they leave very little radiation behind compared to older ones, or the Hiroshima one.
[The B61-13, on the other hand, is designed to have a yield of around 360 kilotons, or 360,000 tons of TNT.]
360 kilotons
Oooh, crowd pleasers! (name the movie without searching)
Though that line was talking about a B-83
Pray that we never have to use one.
To the guy in the photo:
Those earmuffs aren’t gonna help!
Breaking news from the DM! Modern hydrogen bombs have more yield than 1945 atom bombs! The DM is quickly turning into a dumbed down National Enquirer.
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.
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.
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.