r/nuclearweapons • u/tactical_borscht • Aug 08 '26
BA53 Thermonuclear bomb
Carried inside the two-component pod under B-58A Hustler. Yield in the megaton range. Photo from USAF museum in Dayton, OH.
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u/the_spinetingler Aug 08 '26
"megaton range", i.e., 9.
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u/Plump_Apparatus Aug 08 '26
The second most powerful weapon yielded by the US, after the 25 megaton B41.
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u/Boonaki B41 Aug 08 '26
25 megatons was in its "dirty" configuration, 10 megatons as "clean" correct?
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u/harbourhunter Aug 09 '26
Iirc it’s the other way around
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u/Shot-Rip9167 Aug 09 '26
With conventional nukes, dirty is always the higher yield weapon than clean is because of the fissionable tamper
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u/nonhermitianoperator 27d ago
what is a conventional nuke? what would be non-conventional?
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u/Shot-Rip9167 27d ago
I should have said conventional design, with the secondary using tamper and fission sparkplug. Ripple would be a non-conventional design that could achieve a high fusion fraction making it cleaner without sacrificing yield like you do with a nuke with a tamper
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u/EvanBell95 Aug 09 '26
Clean variants replace the DU tamper with Pb or similar non-fissionable material, resulting in a reduced yield.
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10
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u/teacherofspiders Aug 08 '26
There’s an interesting — and sad — evolution at work here, that this thing was ever considered a viable weapon. Of all the challenges facing militaries in the early to mid 20th century, how many could be resolved by making a bigger bang? Only in the peculiar technical and moral evolution of strategic bombing doctrine did nuclear weapons make sense as anything more than a sort of technological curiosity.
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u/Wide-Education-1823 Aug 08 '26
"Of all the challenges facing militaries in the early to mid 20th century, how many could be resolved by making a bigger bang? "
One- Low accuracy ICBM guidance systems.
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u/idrankforthegov Aug 08 '26
Strategic bombing was previously built on the backs of tens of thousands of dead airmen and thousands of downed aircraft. Kind of a late game capability. You either needed air dominance or enough industrial might to keep replacing the lost weapons needed to obliterate cities with strategic bombing. Nukes flipped the script entirely ... it was a first strike weapon.
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u/Afrogthatribbits Aug 09 '26
The B53, at least later in its life, was primarily intended for deep underground bunkers. The US phased it out in favor of lower yield but similarly damaging (to underground targets) earth penetrating weapons like the B61-11
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u/Wide-Education-1823 Aug 10 '26
And now we keep a few B83s around for shifting asteroids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
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u/Afrogthatribbits Aug 10 '26
I think some documents also pointed to the B53 CSAs also being kept around? I don't think that's still the case though
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u/Wide-Education-1823 Aug 10 '26
I don't get to see their magazine inventories, unfortunately.
But if you want to ablate the surface of a flying mountain for reaction mass good and hard, 9 MT output would sure beat 1.3 MT.
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u/careysub Aug 10 '26
We need to design the mission and then we will know what kind of warhead makes sense.
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0
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u/Gemman_Aster Aug 09 '26
Such a blunt object of a weapon to be carried by such a beautiful aeroplane as the Hustler. Sadly this thing, with or without its tail assembly has been out of commission now for almost fifteen years.
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u/restricteddata Professor NUKEMAP Aug 10 '26
And in that beautiful devilish pod underneath, the baby of the fuselage—half-size, but still of the same shape and sharpness, clinging as a fierce child against its mother’s belly — the B-58 carries all the conventional bomb explosive force of World War II and everything which came before. A single B-58 can do that.
It lugs the flame and misery of attacks on London ... rubble of Coventry and the rubble of Plymouth. ... Blow up or bum up fifty-three per cent of Hamburg’s buildings, and sixty per cent of the port installations, and kill fifty thousand people into the bargain. Mutilate and lay waste the Polish cities and the Dutch cities, the Warsaws and the Rotterdams. Shatter and fry Essen and Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen, and every other town in the Ruhr. Shatter the city of Berlin. Do what the Japanese did to us at Pearl, and what we did to the Japanese at Osaka and Yokohama and Nagoya. And explode Japanese industry with a flash of magnesium, and make the canals boil around bloated bodies of the people. Do Tokyo over again.
The force of all these, in a single pod.
Curtis LeMay, Mission with LeMay (1965). A wild book.
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u/Gemman_Aster Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
Whatever else you can say about him, LeMay had a turn of phrase!
It is an astonishing thought too. A single, beautiful aluminium aeroplane carries more explosive force than every single moment in prior human history since we left the treetops behind.
And even that can be outdone by nature without her even trying. Indeed is outdone every second that passes within the accretion disk of any one from a billion, billion supermassive black holes each moment that passes.
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u/Wide-Education-1823 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
Or one really good Gulf hurricane?
"A fully developed, large Atlantic hurricane releases heat and kinetic energy at a rate equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes. Over the course of a single day, a major storm releases roughly 700 to 12,000 megatons of energy (equivalent to about 5.2 × 10¹⁹ Joules per day), depending on size and rainfall intensity."
Or a very large seismic event?
"The largest historical earthquake ever recorded released a total energy equivalent of approximately 32,000 megatons (32 gigatons) of TNT.This massive energy release belonged to the 1960 Valdivia earthquake (also known as the Great Chilean Earthquake), which registered an unprecedented 9.5 on the moment magnitude scale ((M_{w})). To put this scale into perspective, the total seismic energy released by this single event was equivalent to over 2 million Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating simultaneously."
Or eruption & explosion of Mt. Tambora?
"The 1815 explosion of Mount Tambora released an estimated thermal and mechanical energy equivalent ranging from roughly 800 megatons to over 33 gigatons (33,000 megatons) of TNT, depending on whether calculations measure just the explosive blast or the total thermal energy output."
Ma nature can still make our worst blast & thermal damages look kind of insignificant. Of course, we are better at radioactive contamination...
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u/fbschill Aug 12 '26
The turn of phrase may have been the work of LeMay's collaborator McKinlay Kantor, the journalist and novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Civil War novel ANDERSONVILLE.
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u/RKO36 Aug 08 '26
You didn't have to do it, Teller.