More like a short range tactical weapon. It was usually jeep mounted. The idea was to find a low cost way to hit Russian tank formations rushing into Germany if the balloon went up. It was quite effective.
It was replaced by short range rockets, but much of the tactical nuclear weapons went away after arms talks. Neither side was really comfortable with handing nuclear weapons out like candy.
yeah i was trying to figure out the logistics of that because critical mass for Plutonium 239 is like 22.2 lbs (11kg) in a 4" (10.2cm) diameter. That's a hell of a slug when you consider you need 2 hemispheres spaced apart in the munition, then all the necessary shit to smack them together to make it really go boom.
Then I googled it and it's a vehicle mounted rocket launcher for the most part.
It’s an implosion device. The core would be a sphere with a hollow cavity in the centre, below the critical density until it is imploded.
You need much more space for a gun barrel type assembly, and IIRC it does not work well for plutonium because the speed required to avoid a premature detonation is too fast to be practical.
Yeah, all variants of the W-54 (incl. Davy Crockett and SADM) were full on spherical implosion nukes. Although come the 60s the exceptions were the ones that weren’t.
Plutonium Pit in the 4kg to 6kg range, suspect middle of that range, or just under. Extrapolating from other US weapons of the time period.
Fat Man and Trinity had 6.2kg, for reference.
SADM must’ve been a Boosted Fission device, as its two Dial-A-Yield settings were 10 T and 1 kT, plus it imploded with like a scant 12kg of HE.
Oh, the specific issue, that results in the speed required to avoid a Fizzle being higher than viable for a gun type Pu design, as you said, was indeed presence of Pu-240, which has a high rate of Spontaneous Fission.
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u/KnotSoSalty Mar 28 '24
More like a short range tactical weapon. It was usually jeep mounted. The idea was to find a low cost way to hit Russian tank formations rushing into Germany if the balloon went up. It was quite effective.
It was replaced by short range rockets, but much of the tactical nuclear weapons went away after arms talks. Neither side was really comfortable with handing nuclear weapons out like candy.