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Nuclear disarmament refers to both the act of reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons and to the end state of a nuclear-free world, in which nuclear weapons are eliminated. Beginning with the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty and continuing through the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty , there have been many treaties to limit or reduce ...
Soviet analysts had correctly assumed that the NATO response would be to use regular tactical nuclear weapons to stop such a massive Warsaw Pact invasion. [35] According to proponents, neutron bombs would blunt an invasion by Soviet tanks and armored vehicles without causing as much damage or civilian deaths as the older nuclear weapons would. [4]
Some tactical nuclear weapons have specific features meant to enhance their battlefield characteristics, such as variable yield, which allow their explosive power to be varied over a wide range for different situations, or enhanced radiation weapons (the so-called "neutron bombs"), which are meant to maximize ionizing radiation exposure and to ...
Nuclear weapons use the energy inside of an atom's nucleus to create massive explosions. This goal is achieved through nuclear fission and fusion. [72] Nuclear fission is when the nucleus of an atom is split into smaller nuclei. This process can be induced by shooting a neutron at the nucleus of an atom.
The first nuclear explosive devices provided the basic building blocks of future weapons. Pictured is the Gadget device being prepared for the Trinity nuclear test. Nuclear weapons design are physical, chemical, and engineering arrangements that cause the physics package [1] of a nuclear weapon to detonate. There are three existing basic design ...
As thermonuclear weapons represent the most efficient design for weapon energy yield in weapons with yields above 50 kilotons of TNT (210 TJ), virtually all the nuclear weapons of this size deployed by the five nuclear-weapon states under the Non-Proliferation Treaty today are thermonuclear weapons using the Teller–Ulam design. [7]
The M-388, a W54 nuclear warhead variant, weighed less than 60 pounds (27 kg). At the projectile's lowest yield setting of 10 tons, roughly equivalent to a single MOAB, its explosive force was only 1/144,000th (0.0007%) that of the Air Force's 1.44-megaton W49 warhead, a nuclear weapon commonly found on American ICBMs from the early 1960s.
Early speculation about nuclear weapons assumed that an "atom bomb" would be a large amount of fissile material moderated by a neutron moderator, similar in structure to a nuclear reactor or "pile". [11] Only the Manhattan Project embraced the idea of a chain reaction of fast neutrons in pure metallic uranium or plutonium.