US Says It Has 5,113 Nuclear Warheads

news.yahoo.com ^ | May 3, 2010 | Anne Gearan

[FarRightFanatic]

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon says the U.S. maintains 5,113 nuclear warheads in its stockpile and "several thousand" more retired nukes that await dismantling. Monday's announcement marked the first time the Pentagon has officially disclosed the number. The U.S. has previously regarded such details as top secret. A senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the size of the stockpile represents a 75 percent reduction since 1989.

[jeltz25]

well, keep in mind, the Hiroshima bomb was around 15kt or so. Today we have bombs that are way more powerful, or at least I think we do. We have H Bombs, MIRVs, thermonuclear, etc... We have yields ion the megaton range. kt is 1000 tons, mt is 1000000 tons, so some of the bombs we have today are.

Our largest yield is apparently the B83 that has 1.2MT or 1200kt yield. That’s 80X more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

So, the bombs today would probably take out way more than 166,000 per warhead. If you multiply it by 80, you get around 13M, enough to say goodbye to Beijing.

[GonzoGOP]

each one of those warheads is far far more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

True, but there are probably are more than 5000 population or defense targets to bomb in China. Overkilling one target doesn't help you with the next one. Besides that assumes that all the missiles launch and all the planes get through. If we are slinging nukes it is a fair assumption that the other guy will be slinging theirs back and trying like heck to catch as many of ours on the ground as possible.

Our nukes have been getting a lot smaller over time. While still larger than the Fat Man (25kt), most of the very large nukes, MK-17 & MK-24 (15 Mt) were retired years ago. The W-88 on the Tridents are in the 475kt range, but there are only a few hundred of those. Most of our bombs are the smaller, easier to deliver and more precisely targeted destructive capacity. Probably under the theory that when well placed even a little nuke can ruin you whole day. Great when fighting the Soviets with a population of only 144 million, but not as much with the Chinese with a population ten times that size.

Another thing that makes it hard to rate the size of our arsenal is that most of the weapons are dial a yield. The Mk-83s, that are our main gravity bombs, go from one or two KT when used for bunker busting to 1.2MT when used for city smashing.

[Sawdring]

Why would you assume a similar kill ratio when the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were were much smaller than the yields of modern nuclear weapons?

[Sawdring]

Why do you say that?

[PhilDragoo]

China is not deterred by Hussein--any more than are Putin, Rat Boy, Little Kim.

Gooks in the wire; it's a wonderful war.

[Professional Engineer]

Only 5100? Shoot, we need to quadruple that at least.

[expatguy]

Our nation simply wont be the use nuclear weapons and therefore they no longer serve as a deterant

[Sawdring]

I think Obama would use them.

[GonzoGOP]

Yield isn't everything. If your statement were true then Nagasaki should have killed 50% more than Hiroshima since it was a bigger bomb, except that it actually killed only about half as many because of the topography and the fact that the city was smaller. A small number of big nukes are great if your enemy has a small number of big targets. The W-88s are great for smashing the big cities, but to annihilate an enemy and be sure that they have absolutely no capability to retaliate you need to hit all the targets all at once.

Also you have to assume some won't get delivered. So you need to put multiple nukes on high value targets regardless of how big the warhead just to be sure you get it.

[ronnyquest]

Well, so much for all that fuss during the Cold War.

[Kickass Conservative]

Remember Obama proclaiming that the United States wouldn't weaponize Space? Then he tells the world what our Nuclear Deterrent Policy is. Obama is a Useful Idiot for our enemies.

Liberals think it's a Kumbaya World. I guess we should have given the Japanese the flight plan for the Enola Gay.

I liken this to the British handing Stalin a few of their early Jet Engines and the Rosenbergs giving Stalin the Design Schematics for the Nuclear Bomb.

Democrat Politicians are Traitors, and I'm starting to think the people who vote them in are co-conspirators.

[Rca2000]

THAT kind of threat is why we still need to have some “big ones”, like we used to have. 40 years ago—the US still had a few hundred 10+MT bombs, that could take care of 5 million or more people at once, or more, in a heavily populated area like Red China. We also had FOUR TIMES as many bombs in total.

Now-—we depend on “pinpoint accuracy” and small yields, of less than 1MT for nearly ALL of our weapons.

[GonzoGOP]

Our largest yield is apparently the B83 that has 1.2MT or 1200kt yield. That’s 80X more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb

True, but the most common weapons in the arsenal is the W-80 (aprox 2100 @ 170kt), Mk-61 (aprox 1350 @ 80kt) and the W-62 (600 @ 170kt) are not 80 times the size of the Nagasaki bomb, but are only 4 to 7 times the 25kt of the Fat Man. With only 5000 total weapons these smaller weapons make up over 60% of our stockpile.

[rednesss]

Something else you’re not taking into consideration. In 1945, every piece of machine that makes life livable didn’t contain a bunch of transistors and electronics that will be fried the second a nuclear bomb detonates. The amount of casualties in the following weeks due to starvation would probably be more than the number killed by the explosion. 13 million people in Beijing aren’t going to just suddenly have vegetable gardens spring up in a dense urban setting.

[GonzoGOP]

Remember that nukes are a psychological as well as a physical weapon. Demolishing Beijing isn't the problem. It is getting every town in the hinterlands. Lenin once said that he didn't care if half the people in the world died so long as those that remained were communist. So to stop a communist dictator, who doesn't care about the lives of their people or if they have to eat grass like they do in North Korea, it isn't about how many people you kill. Anything less than everybody isn't a deterrent.

[Sawdring]

But to come up with your figure of 800 million, would that be the effects of the initial blast or would that include the massive starvation and deaths due to radiation, burns etc. in the coming months and years?

[cowtowney]

” It seems like hardly any, to me.We should have at least double that number, and we should be prepared to use them.”

Is this an emotional answer or an objective one? Why don’t we have 2 million nukes? Why 5,000? Whether you are willing to use them is another question.

What happens if you have a nuke?
a) you have to guard it
b) you have to maintain it
c) if you don’t use it, you have to remove it from your inventory and remove the nuclear material and do something with it

All of these steps cost money. Lots of it. The military is an inefficient enterprise in general.

Our country is broke. We can no longer do things without thinking about the costs. We never could. We just thought we could.

[cowtowney]

What happens if you have a nuke?
a) you have to guard it
b) you have to maintain it
c) if you don’t use it, you have to remove it from your inventory and remove the nuclear material and do something with it

All of these steps cost money. Lots of it. The military is an inefficient enterprise in general.

Our country is broke. We can no longer do things without thinking about the costs. We never could. We just thought we could.

[Peanut Gallery]

What kind of poker face is this?

[null and void]

Fair enough. Let’s eliminate the military entirely.