The Davy Crockett Nuclear Bazooka. You know, it's my birthday next week...

I don't know how worried I should be about suitcase nukes. I know they don't have much range, comparatively speaking. On the other hand, I work 3 blocks away from the Capitol building, so it wouldn't take that much range if Abdul decides to set one off on the West Lawn of the Capitol grounds.

Yup. Between work and home, I'm never more than a mile from the White House, so I'm toast.

Thing about the W54 is that it had a variable yield; it topped out at one kiloton, but it could produce a blast as "small" as 0.01 kilotons (or equivalent to 10 tons of TNT, or about twice the boom of the truck bomb that went off in Oklahoma City in '95). That would probably be enough to destroy the White House if they could get it inside the perimeter fence, but not much more. Don't get me wrong: it'd be a BIG ASS bomb, but not a city-flattener.

I'm more scared about the bad guys getting ahold of something in the same class as a W76 or W88. A W88 is the most technologically advanced warhead in our arsenal. It's six feet long, two feet in diameter, weighs about 800 pounds, and produces a 475 kiloton blast. That's a city-flattener, even if ground-burst in the back of a Ryder or something.

Presumably the Soviets topped their SS-20's with similar warheads back in the 70's and 80's. Which is a terrifying prospect.

You know, I just had another thought. If somebody did sneak a W54 or similar bomb into a US city and light it off, it might not be at all obvious that it was an atomic bomb. Such a bomb would be too large to carry on foot; it would be way too conspicuous. So it would have to be in the trunk of a car or the back of a truck or something, which means that the bomb effects would probably look like nothing more than a very large truck bomb.

Until somebody pulled out a Geiger counter, that is.

Or until I noticed that I couldn't sleep, wot wit da glow and all.

Bill,
Don't be silly. The nuclear bazooka is useless for home defense or hunting.

...it is, however, perfect for fishing.

I was under the impression that the Russkies generally used larger warheads than we did (1 megaton neighborhood) to compensate for their less accurate missiles.

SS-15 & -16 -warhead up to 1.5MT

I seem to remember a FOBS or maybe an orbital EMP weapon with an even bigger bomb-5MT or so

An SS-15 did indeed carry a warhead of up to 1.5 Mt, but that warhead weighed more than a ton. The SS-19 could carry, at least on paper, a 5 Mt warhead, but it weighed more than four tons. Those suckers were huge.

Trivia time: what's the biggest nuclear bomb ever built? The "Tsar Bomba." It was the size of a Winnebago and, when detonated in October of 1961, produced a blast estimated to be in excess of 50 Mt. A 100 Mt version was planned but never built. (The only difference was the replacement of a uranium fusion tamper with one made out of lead.)

A 100 Mt bomb detonated at 15,000 feet would have been big enough to devastate West Germany. Yes, West Germany. The whole thing.

Ah, yes, the Davy Crockett. Its blast radius was a good bit larger than its operational range. The joke was that it should have been made so you could fire it from a crouch; you might then have time between launch and detonation to kiss your ass goodbye.

Like its soul-brother the nuclear cannon shell, Davy Crocket was designed in the first flush of nuclear optimism with a very important constraint: the average distance between German villages is three kilometers. The weapons were squeezed down, with the idea of being able to blow away Ivan while leaving Fritz's farmhouse intact. Ah, those were the days --

The major ingredient necessary for making a little atomic bomb is tritium, to provide extra neutrons. Tritium decays, fast, and the only known source is nuclear reactors. A little atomic bomb that isn't refilled with tritium on a regular schedule has a technical name: "fizzle." If the "suitcase nukes" are still around, if they haven't been serviced they're basically a few kilos of TNT with a radioactive wrapper. Nasty radioactivity all round, of course, and not to be ignored, but it's designed to blow itself up -- all the force of the conventional explosive is deliberately turned inward.

Regards,
Ric Locke