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Nuclear Weapons
This category is for questions about weapons that use nuclear fission or fusion to gain explosive power.
3,869 Questions
What is conventional vs nuclear weapons?
Conventional explosives get their energy entirely from chemistry; the outer shell of electrons.
Nuclear explosives get their energy from the nucleus. There is lots more energy there.
How many nuclear bombs did the US have after the Japanese surrender?
Probably only the one that had been built just before the Nagasaki bombing but had not yet left the country when the Japanese surrendered.
While the Manhattan Project had plans and facilities to make a total of 24 atomic bombs by the end of 1945, after the war ended the priority to continue operating these facility dropped. Declassified documents show that actual production in 1945 was only 5 atomic bombs and of these 3 had already been detonated (i.e. Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki) resulting in a stockpile at the end of 1945 of just 2 atomic bombs (i.e. one produced before the surrender, one produced after the surrender).
Even as late as 1947 when the Manhattan Project came to an end and the Atomic Energy Commision took over the stockpile was only 13 atomic bombs, and none of these were complete they were just kits of parts that would have to be assembled by hand in the field by an assembly team of trained specialists over a period of 3 days before the bomb could be used. The Atomic Energy Commision also discovered that no such assembly teams existed and there were no plans to train people in the specialized skills they would need to work on these assembly teams.
When President Harry S. Truman was informed of all this by the Atomic Energy Commision it is said that his face turned completely grey! Since the end of the war he had been concentrating on balancing the Federal Budget by gutting the conventional military and depending 100% on atomic bombs to defend the US... and now he essentially was informed that he had neither a conventional nor a nuclear defense!
What is the mutual assured destruction?
The theory of nuclear war that both sides should have enough weapons to be able to effectively destroy the other, resulting in a stalemate and preventing either from starting a war.
This theory fails when there are multiple sides.
How many nuclear bombs were made in world war 2?
In August 1945 the US had three (3) atomic bomb weapons.
The test bomb nicknamed "the Gadget" ( a FAT MAN design type) was detonated at the TRINITY test site at Alamogordo Air Base , NM on 16 July 1945 (blast yield of 18.6 kilotons).
Two weapons, code named for the types of bombs designs and not the weapons themselves, were a LITTLE BOY (a MARK 1; bomb L-11) uranium U-235 bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 06 Aug 1945 (blast yield of 12-16 kilotons) called Operation: CENTERBOARD I and a FAT MAN (a MARK 3; bomb Y1561) plutonium Pu-239 bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 09 Aug 1945 (blast yield of 20 kilotons) called Operation: CENTERBOARD II. The third bomb also a FAT MAN (MARK 3) intended for Kokura on 19 Aug 1945 Operation: CENTERBOARD III was not used. Niigata and Yokohama were the next two (2) of the 17 (seventeen) targeted Japanese cities not bombed. Tokyo was considered a target city only of last resort since the Emperor, the Supreme War Council, the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the Imperial Army and Navy General Staffs would have to survive to order an unconditional surrender.
The US had plans to manufacture and assemble one (1) more LITTLE BOY U-235 uranium bomb and up to twelve (12) additional FAT MAN Pu-239 plutonium bombs to drop on the targeted Japanese cities before the invasion of Japan code named Operation: DOWNFALL on 01 Nov 1945, but the surrender of Japan 14 Aug 45 (V-J Day) halted production and assembly of further atomic weapons until the Operation: CROSSROADS tests in June 1946.
Sources:
Pincher - D. A. Rosenberg 1989
Silverplate Bombers - R. H. Campbell 2005
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb - G. Alperovitz 1995
Making of the Atomic Bomb - R. Rhodes 1987
The General and the Bomb - W. Lawren 1988
Now It Can Be Told - L. Groves 1983
Which country can build the most nuclear weapons?
United States of America.
Why?
Because it has over 160 Nuclear reactors to produce Plutonium and Tritium. This rapidly alows engineers to construct more warheads.
Which is common household pest capable of surviving a nuclear attack?
Most insects have a far higher LD50 for ionizing radiation than any mammal, but its a myth that cockroaches will survive nuclear war.
Can the President fire nuclear missiles without the approval of the Senate?
The President is the Commander In Chief of the US armed forces, and as such, he is fully empowered to make any decision and issue any order that he deems to be necessary to deal with a military threat to the US, and that would include firing nuclear missiles. If the US were under attack, that would not be a good time for the President to go to Congress and see if he can persuade them to authorize military action. However, the President can't declare war, on the Congress can do that. It may be that actually declaring war would be superfluous, if nuclear missiles were already fired.
the possibility that they might be stolen due to lax security because guards were not being regularly paid.
When did nuclear proliferation start?
- officially - 1949 when USSR tested their first atomic bomb
- actually - ~1944 when spies stole US atomic bomb plans and delivered them to the KGB
What weapon was used for the first nuclear weapon?
fatman, little boy and trinity they are nuclear bombs used on japan (exept trinity) at the end of the second world war.
What make stars light in the night?
Most of the celestial objects we call stars are stellar bodies much like our sun. Our sun is a large mass of hydrogen. There is so much hydrogen gathered together in one place that it all holds together by its own gravity. So much, that its own gravity is crushing the atoms together. Not just together in a way like we normally see here on Earth when we view solids, but together so tightly that the nuclei touch. And tighter still, until the nuclei fuse together. This is called nuclear fusion. On Earth we only experience this event when a thermonuclear bomb is detonated. A thermonuclear bomb (H-Bomb) makes an atom bomb look weak. There is so much hydrogen in our sun that this explosion was been going on for millions of years and will continue for millions more before it burns out. And there are stars out there that make our sun look like a midget. Some of the things we call stars are the remains of some of these giants who ended their lives in an explosion beyond all comprehension called a super nova. Some of the stars aren't really stars at all but an enormous collection of stars called galaxies. All different and yet all the same because all that light comes from the same process ...... nuclear fusion.
