No technical detail, but some pictures and names of some current nuclear weapons test instrumentation programs. Reporting by Geoff Brumfiel, National Public Radio.

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5276315/atomic-bomb-nuclear-weapons-lab-nevada

Is there accounts of which B-52 dropped the Housatonic? I know 52-0013 was there and dropped a mk-36 shell at least once during Operation Dominic, but was it 0013? If not, which one?

I saw a comment on tiktok that said that modern nukes are made to minimize nuclear fallout, is that true?

Let's talk hypothetically for a second here, what is the absolute most horrific nuke humanity could create, I'm talking about a globally life destroying, ecologically ending powerhouse of death.

What would it's power source be based from? I'm very aware of the power of the tsar bomba but that barely has enough power to even dent the ecology of earth in its entirety, lets say hypothetically a nuke was created that had 400 x 10^44 joules of energy, what would that do to the earth?

My understanding is that the USSR exerted much tighter military and political control of the Warsaw Pact than the US did of NATO, as indicated by the former's armed interventions in Czechoslovakia and Hungary to keep them in line. But there were still moments of tensions within the Warsaw Pact, with some members taking lines more distant from or hostile towards the Soviet Union. Did the non-Soviet members ever use this latitude to pursue their own nuclear weapons?

This trump Rhetoric has me thinking, in a potential future Canada could potentially need to develop a nuke to defend our sovereignty, does Canada have enough internal resources to develop a nuclear program without any outside help? I'm Assuming no other counties would be of help us due to their own deals with the states.

Basically, I'm just wondering if the various fortified underground facilities from the Cold War are still viable, or if modern missiles have effectively rendered them obsolete.

To my very limited knowledge the facilities were made with the hope that any incoming missiles would only be accurate to within a few kilometres, which was an entirely reasonable hope 50-60 years ago. But with the accuracy of modern missiles meaning an effectively direct hit is highly likely, is there any realistic possibilities of these facilities surviving?

I admit this comes from seeing a YouTube video about the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

It occurred to me Canada, Denmark, Mexico and Panama's strategic considerations around becoming nuclear powers may have changed recently. I'd imagine this is mostly quiet discussions at this point, but do you think we'll see a wave of proliferation in the next few years? The game theory case for it seems compelling.

A new report by the National Security Archive on the Nth Country experiment has been published see

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2025-01-23/nuclear-proliferation-and-nth-country-experiment

Is a neutron nuclear fusor dangerous? Can it explode like a nuclear reactor?

Hello,

I’m a photographer and I’m putting together a web site on nuclear weapons and I would love your feedback. The site is called American Nukes.

The site is www.americannukes.com

The heart and soul of the site are the photographs which I made on two “round the country" road trips (and several “shorter” road trips). I drove something like 25,000 miles, visited 35 states and maybe 55 or 60 sites over the past two years.

The goal is/was to photograph nuclear weapons wherever they are on public display with the hope that people (non-specialists) would find it useful to know something about nuclear weapons beyond some general abstraction and to learn a little of the evolution of the weapons, maybe enough to participate in political debates on the issues they present.

Each weapon page also has detailed caption for each of the images, a short essay, a few specs on the weapon(s), an image from NukeMap with the weapons destructive capabilities shown (with a link back to the NukeMap page), a selection of relevant online videos, and a list of links for further reading.

There will be, once I am done, something like fifty weapons pages—I have the first four done now: Trinity, Little Boy, Fat Man, and “Post-WWII Fat Man Bomb Designs” and I am adding more each week.

There is also, elsewhere on the site, a section on locations where you might see the weapons for yourselves. So far I have listed the (almost all) of the sites I visited and soon I will add the rest of the potential sites from my database. The direct link to the list of sites is:

https://www.americannukes.com/locations/

As you can see if you fish around a bit, I also plan to include sections on books, podcasts, substacks, movies, and so forth, in the future.

If you like, you can add your name to my updates list and, once a month, the page will send out an e-mail with the list of recent additions and changes.

I hope you enjoy the site, even in its infancy, and I very much welcome (here or directly via Reddit or the site's Contact page) any feedback of any kind. Questions, comments, suggestions, and corrections are most welcome.

Thanks,

Darin Boville

(Who am I? I'm a photographer, not a nuclear expert or historian. :) You can see more of my work at www.darinboville.com and also at my blog, A Bigger Camera, at www.abiggercamera.com ).

What are the best countries region to survive a catastrophic nuclear extange/fallout? Am I correct thinking southern Mexico South America like Peru?

For argument's sake, let's say I have a nuke (lmao) and a .50 caliber machine gun. Is it possible that with enough damage to a warhead to the point where whatever is attacking it either strikes an explosive charge or the fission material itself (also for argument's sake, let's go with plutonium or something), could it detonate?

When Jill Hruby delivered remarks at the Hudson Institute on January 16, 2025, she mentioned that
"there are aging concerns other than pits that we need to carefully and continuously assess that require sustaining an array of tools that have not been well-maintained."

I wonder what aging concerns are meant here: electronics, lithium-deuteride, chemical explosives, or human capacities and implicit knowledge? Maybe something completely different?

Thanks a lot already for all your help and thoughts.

I know this is probably a stupid question as the result of even a minimal nuclear exchange would be hellish, but I'm curious about the cleanup process for tactical nuclear weapons. For example, if a Davy Crockett was fired in battle and for whatever reason did not explode, what would happen? It seems like the remaining material from a dud tactical warhead would be both incredibly valuable and dangerous. Someone somewhere at the Pentagon must have been tasked with explaining how the cleanup process would work, right? I'm curious as to what cleanup would mean.

Since “Teller Light” has been popping up in this sub recently:

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4814701/

The abstract and first paragraph note comparison of brightness to sun and the role of initial gamma. Paper itself examines “semi-quantitatively” likely sources.

If you use period (.) and comma (,) keys to navigate to frame 0000 in this (https://youtu.be/UTX-f8bn3Xk) LLNL-uploaded video of Hardtack-I Redwood, there is a blue-ish glow emanating from the very early and tiny fireball. I believe this is the camera inadvertently capturing the device’s Teller Light, which is nitrogen in the air glowing blue from the intense gamma flux during the nuclear reaction. This process is happens very very fast (within a few dozens of nanoseconds for the fusion secondary). That must mean that the shutter for this frame closed just at the right moment for the film not to be overwhelmed by the incandescent fireball produced by the x-rays, which would have followed in the next couple of microseconds. I screen-grabbed the frame, but it’s very dim.