Talk:B53 nuclear bomb

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The article states:

"Two variants were made: the B53-Y1, a dirty weapon using a U-238-encased secondary, and the B53-Y2 "clean" version with a non-fissile (lead or tungsten) secondary casing. Explosive yield was nine megatons."

But, surely these two versions had very different yields? I would expect hte dirty version to be more than twice the power of the clear version.--ManInStone 14:31, 20 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have a question about this sentence:

The explosive "lens" is a mixture of RDX and TNT, which is not insensitive.

I am familiar with the concept of an implosion lens, meaning the variation in the explosive surrounding an implosion device that shapes the inward shock wave into a perfect sphere. Critical mass is achieved by crushing the fissile material equally from all directions. But what does it mean to say that the lens is "not sensitive"? 72.154.165.227 (talk) 01:08, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's not insensitive, not "not sensitive". Insensitive refers to the explosive's sensitivity to shock and fire. Insensitive high explosives - IHE (basically, only those which are based on TATB (triamino trinitro benzine) are extremely resistant to detonation on impact or in fires or so forth. If you're transporting IHE and there's an accident / fire / crash, it's essentially guaranteed not to detonate (though it may burn if it's in a fire).

There's a nuclear weapons safety regulation that says that nuclear weapons using only IHE for explosive charges may be transported by air routinely. Those with normal high explosives (those older than 1970-ish) can't be air transported without specific high level approval, as they could possibly detonate the explosive assembly in a crash. Not with the proper timing and multi-point initiation to detonate the weapon - you'd get a few tens of pounds of high explosive blowing a few pounds or ten pounds of plutonium out all over the landscape. But that's bad enough that it's generally strongly avoided.

Also, some older weapons weren't completely one point safe. Under some circumstances, an accidental explosion starting somewhere in the explosives could cause the weapon to generate a small nuclear explosion, with yield ranging from a fraction of a pound of TNT equivalent (large neutron burst, but not much energy added) to a few or ten tons of TNT equivalent (very large neutron / gamma burst, and very significant explosion). All non one point safe weapons should have long ago been out of US inventory.

The B-53 is described as one-point safe but not using IHE, so it is not as safe as more modern weapons. Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 08:15, 21 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've linked to a website that generates the image of using the calculator that was included with many (including mine) copies of a book called The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. Look at the results (top image), the size of the bomb is represented by the cursor at 6 o'clock (bottom of the upper image). The size of the fireball is a small window: start at the center of the image, and proceed radially outwards towards 1 o'clock and you'll see some small print stating "fireball radius average" and the other cursor will show a mark midway between 1.6 and 1.8 miles radius which would result in a fireball around 3 point something miles in diameter. Tangurena (talk) 21:57, 22 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm... Thanks for some interesting stats. If you feel you can improve the article with them, please feel free to edit the article.

You should be aware though, that Wikipedia has a strict

cite

the documents that you are getting them from.

Thanks, and welcome to Wikipedia. NickCT (talk) 16:24, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would strongly urge citations posted on the talk page before edits. Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 01:23, 4 February 2011 (UTC

Gosh, I am having a hard time with this...how do you respond to a post...this is Roger from Toronto, saying: I don't get it: the article states that the bomb would cause lethal burns within 28 km yet radiation casualty of 50& in (um, sorry, don't have the article in front of me) 5km...does this mean that people at 10 km wouldn't have died from radiation if they hadn't burnt up?!

I think there may be an error in this section "The W53 warhead of the Titan II ICBM used the same physics package as the B53, without the air drop-specific components like the parachute system, reducing its mass to 8.13 lb (3.69 kg)" Just seems a tad light to me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.54.175.253 (talk) 01:38, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comparing that to the first paragraph where a weight of 8850 lb and 800-900 lb for the parachute is stated, this should probably read: reducing its mass to 8130 lb (3690 kg = 3.69 t). Since I'm not sure about the exact values I won't edit the article. 134.93.131.204 (talk) 08:02, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The following segment: "The B53 was intended to be retired in the 1980s, but 50 units remained in the active stockpile until the deployment of the B61-11 in 1997. At that point the obsolete B53s were slated for immediate disassembly; however, the process of disassembling the units was greatly hampered by safety concerns as well as a lack of resources." appears both in the "History" and "Role" sections of the article. Perhaps some-one should do a clean-up of the article. Don't want to do this myself, since this article is well outside the scope of articles I would undertake such work in :) Hargir (talk) 06:49, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Does anyone really use joules rather than kilo/megatons when discussing nuclear weapons? I don't think that particular conversion is necessary. Additionally, the input units in the conversions throughout the article change from imperial to metric and back again. I will fix these to reflect imperial inputs for consistency's sake. Dziban303 (talk) 13:11, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Would a photo of a B53 from the Air Force Museum be helpful to the article? I believe it's of a bit better quality than the current photo from the Atomic Testing Museum. Craigbucher (talk) 20:59, 18 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]