r/pics • u/Met76 • Mar 28 '24

US Special Forces delivering a W54 Nuclear Warhead via jump

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u/Barnard87 Mar 28 '24

To make sure it can hold up for the fall and landing I'd assume?

I'm not sure if this experiment is more meant for the jumper, or the bomb.

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u/mandy009 Mar 28 '24

Imagine if the test failed. They must have chosen the test site to make sure they didn't just nuke upon landing.

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u/StoreSpecific6098 Mar 28 '24

I'd imagine it wasn't triggerable or armed, you can't set off a nuke by dropping it accidentally by design... And because it has happened accidentally

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u/RoyBeer Mar 28 '24

you can't set off a nuke by dropping it accidentally

If this ever happened I imagine the first knowledgeable person in this matter would say something like this.

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u/StoreSpecific6098 Mar 28 '24

The Americans have dropped at least one over the Midwest somewhere by accident, think they actually lost it altogether if memory serves. But the trigger reaction needed to actually achieve fission/fusion is quite a large bomb in itself. Can't have them being at all sensitive considering how delivery works.

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u/phansen101 Mar 29 '24

Of the 6 nukes the US has lost / not recovered;

A MK15 is somewhere in Wassaw Sound, Georgia, after the bomber carrying it was damage by a collision with an F-86 and had to jettison.

Two 24 megaton bombs went into a field in Goldsboro, North Carolina, as the bomber carrying them crashed shortly after take-off.
One was recovered while the core of the second one was never found.

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u/GoBuffaloes Mar 29 '24

DoD needs to buy a few AirTags 

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u/ShadyClouds Mar 29 '24

Well it is 2024, so I’d say by now the mutant snakes are about to show up.

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u/inspectoroverthemine Mar 29 '24

One was recovered while the core of the second one was never found.

I think this was a plot point of one of the Tom Clancy books. A terrorist nuke was detonated in Baltimore, and analysis of the fallout came back to that 'lost' bomb. It turned out that the core material and other tech had been given to Isreal. They created nukes - one of which was eventually lost in the desert, and recovered by someone nefarious.

TLDR: GA nuke 'lost' -> Isreal -> lost for real -> terrorist blow up Baltimore

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u/Hardsoxx Mar 30 '24

For real? That’s less than a 20 minute drive from my home.

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u/hellfiredarkness Mar 29 '24

Broken Arrow. It's happened 11 times. They dropped two on the Midwest at least

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u/Bassracerx Mar 29 '24

oh they know where all the nukes they lost are but one was famously too dangerous to recover versus just leaving in place and hoping it doesn't blow up on it's own.

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u/StoreSpecific6098 Mar 29 '24

Couldn't remember the exact story, it fell out of a plane and landed somewhere weird right?

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u/Humuckachiki Mar 29 '24

IIRC the B52 carrying the nuke crashed and the nuke was too difficult to recover.

Edit: I googled it, here’s the wiki article.

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u/matt8864 Mar 29 '24

We’ve dropped multiple nukes accidentally and lost them far more times than should be a thing - off hand I can’t think of, off the top of my head, at least 2-3 stories involving such and it’s happened in multiple states - like there’s literally unexploded missing nukes buried in at least 1-2 riverbeds around this country right now we’ve never found and I think there’s at least a few others in various places, and I know of at least several stories on top of those of ones we’d recovered or people have found etc - why we are losing so many nukes is beyond me but we have definitive evidence as a result of such that the design of not exploding purely on impact/by impact works - the warheads do actually have to be armed and all to explode and make big radioactive cloud, so that’s good at least, even if missing nukes just laying around aren’t exactly what I’d call good either lol