Tiny Nukes - America's first-strike nuclear weapons

Popular Mechanics ^ | FR Post 9-30-2002 | BY JIM WILSON

[vannrox]

Tiny Nukes
America's first-strike nuclear weapons:
How they work.
Who's in the crosshairs.
BY JIM WILSON
Lead photo by Randy Montoya/Sandia National Laboratories

As a horrified nation watched the twin towers and Pentagon dissolve in flames, a realization more chilling than the audacity of the attack gripped the nation's defense planners. The Saudi and Egyptian terrorists who turned hijacked airliners into human-guided missiles had attacked far more than the edifices of the nation's financial and military power. Although not obvious to most watching the unfolding drama, the assault also pulverized the keystone of America's strategic defense policy-the concept of nuclear deterrence. "Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against nations, means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend," President George W. Bush told the West Point class of 2002. "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge." Even before he spoke, designers were at work creating a weapon to deter terrorists. It would be a new type of nuclear weapon that could, at least in theory, hurt foes without harming friends. It would be a weapon of precise destruction.

Using the Global Positioning System, the United States has the ability to deliver a conventional or nuclear warhead within inches of its target, anywhere in the world. Our adversaries have responded by burying key command and control installations and nuclear and bioweapons laboratories deeper and deeper underground and inside mountains. The only ground penetrator in the current nuclear arsenal is the 1200-pound B61-11 gravity bomb, a wind-tunnel test model of which is shown above. It can penetrate about 20 ft. into a dry lakebed. To reach deeper required weapons designers to strengthen the package used to deliver warheads.

The solution would come in the form of an old weapon, a gun barrel. Artillerymen call the barrels of their guns "tubes." Dating to ancient China, these metallurgical marvels have steadily improved to the point at which they can withstand the forces needed to propel a projectile to the very edge of space. Looking at these historic weapons, scientists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., realized they had the perfect enclosure for a deep-penetrating nuclear weapon. They took their idea to the field and dropped a mock bomb based on a "retired" artillery tube.

Although the test was successful, there remained a critical technical problem. As a projectile drives through rock, it experiences pressures that can cause even the strongest artillery tube alloys to flow like molten plastic. For a chemical explosive, the resulting deformation is not necessarily critical. However, for a nuclear weapon it is nothing short of catastrophic. Dropping a nuclear weapon that fails to explode is tantamount to giving an enemy a nuclear weapon of their own.

One solution, illustrated on the next page, is to prevent deformation by sheathing the artillery tube in an envelope made of virtually indestructible carbon-nanotube fabric. Recently, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratory, also in New Mexico, formed a joint research center, the objectives of which include developing techniques to create bulk quantities of nanomaterials like those needed to sheathe the next-generation bunker buster.

The Next Bomb

As envisioned by former Los Alamos weapons designer Stephen Younger, the next nuclear weapon will rely on a deep-penetrating delivery system to place a small nuclear charge at the heart of a buried target. Precision delivery makes it possible to use a minimum amount of explosive power. Building low-yield nuclear weapons, however, poses physical as well as legal problems.



The physical problem is that below a certain size the reliability of a nuclear detonation decreases rapidly. A certain amount of fissile material, the precise amount is classified, is needed to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. But as the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) discovered in tests in the 1950s and 1960s, warheads with a yield less than 1 kiloton become increasingly unreliable as they become smaller. For this reason, weapons designers doubt that a warhead such as the W54 used on the Davy Crockett tactical nuclear weapon could function as a deep penetrator. Packing the equivalent of 10 tons of explosive, the W54 was to be fired from a mortar at Soviet tank divisions rushing through the Fulda Gap in Germany.

Weapons scientists tell POPULAR MECHANICS that engineering a reliable ultralow-yield weapon requires no breakthroughs, but is forbidden by a legal roadblock. Fearful of the proliferation of so-called "suitcase nukes," Congress in 1994 forbade DOE laboratories from conducting "research and development which could lead to the production by the United States of a new low-yield nuclear weapon, including a precision low-yield warhead."

Because of this restriction, military planners tell PM that the warhead for the weapon of precise destruction likely will be obtained by cannibalizing the "primary" from an existing thermonuclear weapon. Hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs as thermonuclear weapons are generally known, release energy by fusing atoms of tritium, a rare and heavy form of hydrogen. The temperatures needed to initiate the reaction are created by the energy released from a low-yield fission device called the primary.

The ground penetrator will draw from existing and future technologies.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN BATCHELOR

Will It Work? As Younger, who is now director of the Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency explains it, the new weapon would work much as shown in the first three panels of the illustration on the previous page. After burrowing into the buried bunker, the low-yield A-bomb would detonate, immediately melting the surrounding rock, forming a sealed compartment. In theory, cooling rock will encapsulate the resulting fallout. Not everyone, however, is certain that this is how events would play out.



Rob Nelson, a physicist with the Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security, and an expert on nuclear weapons design, has looked carefully at the relationship between the depth of a primary-powered explosion and geological damage. He argues that the sort of deep penetrator proposed by Younger would, in fact, release rather than contain radioactive fallout. While it is true that most material would remain within the blast area, a radioactive cloud seeping from the crater would release a plume of radioactive gases that would irradiate anyone in its path.

He has calculated that a weapon with a yield of about 0.1 kiloton-about one two-hundredth the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima-would have to penetrate to a depth of 230 ft. to fully contain the explosion in the manner that Younger has described. Nelson cautions that if it were used to root out terrorists near a major Third World city such as Baghdad, the casualties could be in the hundreds of thousands.



Nelson's warning should come as no surprise to defense planners. The fallout threat from tiny buried nuclear explosives was documented by the AEC during a Dec. 18, 1964, test conducted at the National Test Site about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. The test, referred to as Sulky, was part of an effort to

[vannrox]

Interesting article.

[Paul Ross]

Indeed. It figures that there would have been an outright BAN on this type of research before the democRATS were evicted from Congress. It wouldn't have happened to be during the lame duck session, eh?

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

Fascinating! Thanks for posting it.

[backhoe]

-Ready for `Mini-nukes`? --

[LouD]

Nelson cautions that if it were used to root out terrorists near a major Third World city such as Baghdad, the casualties could be in the hundreds of thousands.

It's tough to see a downside in that...

[Looking for Diogenes]

The last paragraph of the article got cut off.

The test, referred to as Sulky, was part of an effort to explore the use of small nuclear warheads for massive earthmoving projects, such as digging a wider replacement for the Panama Canal. A tiny 0.1-kiloton warhead was detonated 89 ft. below ground. As the photo on the previous page indicates, blast damage was confined to the area above the explosion. The presence of an escaping plume of radioactive iodine was, however, not revealed until years later. AEC tracking stations in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming reported radiation from the small underground blast. While the amounts were small, their existence serves as a reminder that physical and political fallout will be an inescapable consequence of even the smallest nuclear deterrent.

[VOA]

Tiny Nukes - America's first-strike nuclear weapons

"You can run.
You can hide.
You can dig a very deep hole and fortify it.
But you'll just die more tired than if you'd just run and tried to hide conventionally."

[VOA]

Tiny Nukes - America's first-strike nuclear weapons

Just in time to make it into the Niemann-Marcus Christmas catalog.

Showing your friends a tiny nuke on your mantle instead of those old, tired
vintage British double-barreled shotguns or a Pennsylvania long rifle...
pretty cool.

[Rebelbase]

Tiny Bubbles............. Sorry, it just keep running through my head.

[Mo1]

WIPE THE SMILE OFF OF THIS MAN'S FACE.

VOTE THE RATS OUT!!

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[kimosabe31]

bump

[GeekDejure]

We really need to add a little bit more curvature to our Wallet Sized Nukes !!!

These damned things get rather irritating after sitting for only a minute or two!!! ;-))

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!