Nukes Away: No More B-53 Monster Bomb

America’s last 10,000-pound atomic weapon is defused and discarded.

October 25, 2011

U.S. Department of Energy production technicians lull the last B-53 'Monster Bomb' to sleep at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. (Photo: Reuters)

If the nuclear apocalypse comes tomorrow, it will arrive with considerably less initial wallop. The world’s last B-53 atomic bomb—a five-ton not-smart weapon packed with 300 pounds of high explosives and a heart of enriched uranium—is being dismantled at the Energy Department’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas.

State of the art in 1962, America’s largest Armageddon device was triggered to unleash 9 megatons of destruction—roughly 800 times more hell than the bomb that leveled the bustling Japanese city of Hiroshima.

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All through the 1960s, U.S. Air Force planes maintained flying battle formations, 24 hours a day, loaded with B-53s, ready to make haste for Moscow at a moment’s notice. At the Cold War’s peak, the U.S. nuclear arsenal contained 400 B-53s. That surplus is gone.

Wired reports:

“It’s the end of the era of monster weapons, if you will,” says Hans Kristensen, who directs the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of the American Scientists.

“We have nothing that comes close to it in the stockpile anymore, and neither does Russia. It’s the end of an era.”

Don’t lose any sleep worrying about nuclear-weapon depletion. Once the current United States-Russia nuke-reduction treaty plays out, America will still have 1,500 atomic warheads—loaded, cocked and locked on target.