#Nuke 10 youtube upgrade#
Pretty soon, there will be a choice: upgrade these nuclear weapons, or put them out to pasture.China to be armed with ‘most deadly weapons to ever exist’ after flying hypersonic nuke ‘around the Earth’ Now we're at a point where, instead of making pragmatic annual investments in lab, stockpile, and delivery modernization - we have to do it all at once," says Noonan, the former missileer. "Modernization is expensive because we keep delaying it.
#Nuke 10 youtube mod#
That means must also redesign much of the packaging and components to survive 'laydown' - i.e., thudding into the ground and then exploding a few moments later." An internal Pentagon audit showed 15 of the 29 planned changes for mod 12 are still technologically immature.īut if the improvements aren't made soon, advocates say, they'll only get more expensive. "An atomic bomb dropped without a parachute will explode before the airplane is safely away. (Independent experts say that would take a mere billion or two.) When you swap out the B61's parachute for satellite-guided tail fin assembly, it introduces a new complication, Lewis adds.
One reason why: the mod 12 project - even though it's billed as a "life extension program" - isn't just about replacing the components of the weapons that are decaying or corroding. "It would be less expensive to build solid-gold replicas of each of the 700-pound B61s, even at near-record gold prices," as Lewis recently noted in Foreign Policy. That's not only the equivalent of two-thirds of what the federal government plans to spend on all nuclear weapon enhancements over the next twenty years. By July, that number had grown to $10 billion. In May, the project - which entails upgrading an estimated 400 weapons - had a price tag of $6 billion. But while the rest of the Defense Department is looking to save money, the costs for the mod 12 program keep going up. Air Force nuclear missile officer and a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee. We have a keen interest in keeping that record going," says John Noonan, a former U.S. 60 years without an accidental detonation. Unless critical components of the weapons are replaced - especially the radioactive tritium gas that makes the nuclear blast more efficient - the B61s might have to be withdrawn from the Continent by the end of the decade. Strategic Command, told Congress last year. " Continued funding support is essential to the long-term safety, security, and effectiveness of our nation's nuclear deterrent force," Gen.
And those weapons are meant to assure our allies that if Russia is ever in the mood to invade, America will be there with a capital-B Bomb. These so-called "B61 mod 12s" are meant to replace the 180 or so earlier models that are currently deployed in Western Europe. has other, bunker-busting nuclear weapons that might be employed if, God forbid, there was ever an atomic showdown with North Korea or Iran. Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The Red Army that's sitting in East Germany, ready to plunge into Europe," explains. Just about the only thing that won't change is the weapon's nuclear "pit," and who the U.S. Everything from the spin rocket motors to the electronic neutron generators will be refreshed. It's one part of a bigger package of improvements to the B61 that the Pentagon insists it needs in order to keep this slice of its nuclear arsenal ready for war, if needed. The fins and control systems will be similar to the ones on today's conventional, GPS-guided bombs, potentially making this enhanced version of the B61 the most accurate weapon of mass destruction ever. The $178 million, three-year contract with Boeing is for a prototype "tail kit" for the B61 nuclear weapon. military still somehow found the money on Tuesday to put a down payment on a $10 billion upgrade of its nuclear weapons in Europe - y'know, just in case there's another Cold War. The Pentagon is facing its worst cash crunch in more than a decade, with potential cuts of up to a half-trillion dollars over the next decade if Congress doesn't act soon.
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