Milestone Tests Help Refurbish Dwindling U.S. Nuclear Arsenal
Treat the test subject very, very carefully. It’s a thermonuclear bomb.
The B61 is an American tactical gravity device (a relatively low-energy bomb dropped from aircraft rather than carried on a missile) with a variable, 0.3-to-340-kiloton yield. It was designed in the early 1960s; the U.S. made some 3 100 B61s, in a number of different configurations, for deployment at home and in Europe.
Today (according to nuclear-weapons watchdogs at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) about 200 B61s remain in service in the U.S. and 180 are deployed with NATO allies in Europe. While the U.S. military continues to reduce the number of H-bombs, they’re also trying keep the few that remain in good working order until they can be scrapped. Thus, the B61, along with three types of nuclear warheads for submarine-launched and other missiles, is the object of a $US 11 billion Life Extension Program (LEP) designed to keep them operational into the 2030s.
In the process, the Pentagon plans to modify the four current B61 models into a single configuration, the B61-12.
Full article by Douglas McCormick, IEEE Spectrum
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Roger Chu is the Marketing Coordinator at GSAmart, the leading GSA sales and marketing partner for technology companies.
