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US Disassembles Its Last B53, 9Mt Nuclear Weapon
The last parts of the B53 will be disassembled today at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas. The plant is managed and operated for the United States Department of Energy by BWXT Pantex and Sandia National Laboratories. BWXT Pantex is a limited liability enterprise of Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Group, Honeywell and Bechtel.First put into service in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the B53 weighted about 10,000 lbs, and was designed to destroy deeply buried underground facilities when dropped by a B-52 bomber. Since the engineers and technicians who designed and built the bomb have long since retired or died, developing a safe disassembly process took a long time, and tools had be fabricated along with procedures to remove some 300 lbs of high explosive and a large amount of radioactive material. Many B53 bombs were disassembled in the 1980s, but they were not officially removed from the inventory until 1997. Posted by: Anonymoose 2011-10-25 |
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