Type W59
Been a bit since I did an Archibald strip, and this one occurred to me a couple days ago when I again was talking about guns with someone, and some anti-gun fucker brought up the retarded argument of “YOU THINK PEOPLE SHOULD JUST BE ABLE TO BUY A NUCLEAR WARHEAD?”
Yes. Yes, I do, because they already can. If my neighbor has $37 million to just drop on a nuclear warhead, no gun control law is going to stop him. He might get stopped by NATO forces, or the CIA, but… hell, if he’s that fucking rich, even that’s debatable. Making a law that says you can’t buy nuclear warheads is absolutely retarded.
What I’m saying is that if Bill Gates really wanted a nuclear warhead, he would get one. But… he probably wouldn’t, because of the whole radiation thing. And storing it. And moving it. Shipping costs alone would be a nightmare.
If I wasn’t on a list already, you better believe I am now, after the searches online I did to make this comic. HI THERE PRISM AGENTS, you horrible fuckers.
Been feeling a bit anarchist for a few days.
And if you want to be bumped up the list, ask the readers what they would do with a megaton yield nuke. Disabling the detonator safeties would be PITA, but that childhood craving for big explosions must not be denied. Of course you also get to say ”Top this!” to Mythbusters.
@The Cranky Saint
Actually, disabling the PAL on the W59 would be piss-easy. Curtis LeMay, the general in charge of SAC, out of paranoia that the codes would be misplaced in the event of an attack, ordered all PAL codes for current warheads to be set to, prepare yourself, “00000000.” It was even on the checklist in the Minuteman I silos until 1977 that all PAL hardware was to be keyed to “00000000” at all times.
But, that wasn’t even the worst security. The Brits used a bicycle lock key on their gravity bombs (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm), and to this day, the senior staff aboard their missile submarines remain the most trustworthy individuals on this planet, as they retain principal launch control over all missiles aboard their boats – no authentication or two-man system for launch authority exists. They could sail to sea and start WW3 all on their lonesome without a single ‘go-ahead’ from the Prime Minister.
I belive that the missile warhead detonators need certain centrifugal force to activate, so they would need to be reworked if you want to use the warhead as a bomb. Unless you acquire missile ans launcher as well.
*Modern* warheads have these sensors, yes. 60s-era warheads primarily used detonator safeties, the vulnerability of which was exposed in the Goldsboro incident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
I’m pretty sure that the US nuke commanders and Sub Captains retain the ability to launch independent of order from the president, in case the enemy does a “decapitation” attack where it takes out the president first. They do require two person activation though, so they are a little safer than the brits I guess.
You know… there are a few post apocalyptic myths I’ve been dying to find out about….
Guaranteed I’m on The List. Lots of WMD in my searches. I have to keep up on the latest and greatest for what I do in the Army Reserve. Fun stuff. Of course it doesn’t help that my stepdaughter married an Al Qaeda money man back in ’03. I stopped that shit right quick and in a hurry, but it triggered a suspension of my security clearance until the mess was cleaned up. Yeah, they’re watching me. 🙂
There was an episode of “Boston Legal” a few years back where a Massachusetts town government petitions for the ability to build and store a nuclear warhead for ‘self-defense’ to strictly address this point you’re trying to make. They didn’t *really* want a nuclear weapon, they just had the money to pay a good physicist to build one, and there wasn’t a law on the books saying they COULDN’T have one. In fact, one of the only legally-binding “no nuclear weapons” clauses on book is from Apple Computer of all things, expressly forbidding the use of their products in the development of WMD.
The US government’s position on the idea is nebulous: http://nelsnewday.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/scalia-supports-private-ownership-of-nuclear-devices/
And, as for the mention of the W54/Mk-54 warhead (familiar to anyone who’s played the recent Metal Gear games), the single best secret kept by the nuclear weapons community is that *those* types were the smallest warheads ever designed, when in truth they’re simply the smallest warheads ever declassified.
Is the W54 smaller than a 155mm round?
Significantly. It weighed about half as much as a W48: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48
There’s also the lunacy of Cambridge, MA having officially declared itself (complete with appropriate street signs) a “nuclear-free zone” since the ’60s. With labs at both Harvard and MIT, Cambridge has more nuclear reactors within its borders than any other town in the US.
In the ’90s, Cambridge tried to declare itself a “domestic violence-free zone.” Thousands of women began packing suitcases. 🙂
Sounds like a great idea for a book, too…
…the development of an non-ideological Randian shadow corporation that sells privately-manufactured nuclear weapons to all capable buyers. Imagine billionaires with H-Bomb security systems on their homes (because fuck ADT, amirite), banks buying a stockpile to ransom the government with if they ever bet big and lose again, big-pharma biolabs equipping their most secure and potentially-dangerous labs with neutron bombs (a la Andromeda Strain) to cover up any ‘oopsies.’
It’s capitalism in its purest form – the corporation is selling to customers who have a demand and the means to pay for the goods and services. What those customers believe or what they wish to *do* with their purchased goods means nothing to them, and in fact, the more they buy, the more those people’s enemies will want/need to buy their own weapons for self-defense/retaliatory leverage.
Radiation destroys mechanical parts and electronics. The technology isn’t much more sophisticated than a Boeing 707 unless it got upgraded in the 80’s. Other than the nuclear fuel, this lump is in the same shape as a 67 Chevy that has been sitting in the bottom of a chlorinated swimming pool since new. Repair parts have been discontinued from their single source and are a bitch to find. It would be an amazing Make Fair project.
That depends on how well comp B works as a radiation shield; the secondary has (likely) mostly decayed by now and you’d likely have to fire it as a straight fission bomb unless you had a couple million extra to buy new tritium or lithium deuteuride for it. Depends on the half life of the secondary and the material used, really. Either way, just because it’s listed as a megaton on the box doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily GET that without a few million in overhaul expenses.
It’s time to check the surplus stores. I remember a flap about someone that had assembled a complete nuke except for the fissile components. I don’t think lithium deuteuride decays and there are millions of tritium glow in the dark watches available.
yes, but you’re talking about milligrams when you need several grams, Also, did some checking on lithium deuteride. Turns out that both Lithium-6 and Deuterium are stable isotopes, but the combined solid tends to react in borderline hypergolic manner, is corrosive before, during and especially after reaction, and tends to be generally unstable, toxic, corrosive and unpleasant.
Way I look at it now, if you haven’t been added to a government watch list yet, you should just be ashamed of yourself.
And what would you DO with one once you had it? If you’re rich enough to buy it, then you’re pretty much rich enough to get anything the threat of a nuke would get you.
Firstly, ROTFLOL @ the comic.
Even more so, that video was quite the epic rant against corporate consumer control. I’ma hafta check out more of Adam Freeland’s stuff.
Maintenance costs would be a bitch.
Fun fact about nuclear weapons: one of the blast enhancers in the warhead is polystyrene foam. Same stuff they put ’round the ends of your laptop or computer monitor or TV when they packed it in a box at the factory. They found out that upon initial triggering of the warhead the polystyrene turns to plasma, which further enhances the effect of the bomb (I don’t understand the exact science, so there we go). However, over time, alpha radiation emission from the warhead causes the polystyrene to break down and become this tarry black goo, so it has to be periodically replaced – as do a bunch of other components in a warhead (again, periodically).
/themoreyouknow
does it have to be polystyrene foam or will non-foam polystyrene do?
So this is how Raven got his nuke and became sovereign in Neal Sephanson’s “Snow Crash”? Facts get weirder than fiction. Kinda want mafia delivered pizza now.
I *knew* he was lying about raiding the nuclear sub!
nerve gas seems safer. And won’t set off car alarms for miles…
Also, easier to make, keep and store. It does have a shelf life though, so if you intend to use it, you can’t just leave it sitting. Better to have the unmixed chemicals separate. Aaaaand Hi NSA.
Binaries FTW.
Remember that in the end what is illegal depends on who has more tanks and guns and bombs. I can guarantee you that if you as an individual had a nuke for sale, a cruise missile would come crashing through your window before you’d get a chance to sell it. Even nations have to be careful about such things — Pakistan, for example, has not sold its nukes to anybody (not even to North Korea) because if they did the sh*tstorm would pretty much end them as a going concern. Even Israel did not sell a nuke to South Africa back when they were buddy-buddy during Apartheid days — Israel traded technology for a place to test their own bomb, but South Africa was expected to build their own bomb with that technology because loss of their Western allies and an iron-clad embargo by sea and air would have been the end of Israel.
So no, Jeff Bezos is not going to be buying a nuke anytime soon, regardless of how many billions he bids for it.
I’m Googling automatic and/or nuclear weapon training and extensions for CHL. Nothing relevant on Amazon or Ebay ads.
Meh, I’ll get the Birdman Nuke 50 handgun instead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_XX2lIT1tQ‎
Smaller, more modern, easier to transport. I’m not doing retro this week.
Mr. Colion Noir’s response to this excuse that the anti-gunners always throw at us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2tLVPVS0Bc
Basically, explosives or nukes or whatever aren’t a practical option because you blow yourself and everyone else up.
Hm. I have a vague memory about reading about “less than brilliant laws” somehwere, and one mentioned it was illegal to detonate nuclear warheads inside city limits, undera fine of 500$ or something like that. Was a local law for some southern city.
True or not? Sure sounds bonkers enough to actualy be true.
Yeah, my standard one-line response to that idiocy is, “Do you really think that anyone who really wants one and has the money to buy one doesn’t already have one?”
Don’t have the time to read the whole comment thread, so perhaps this has been brought up, but nuclear weapons aren’t actually (dangerously) radioactive. Specifically, the fissionable material isn’t. If it was, it would damage the electronics in the weapon and make it useless pretty quickly. The exception would be the small quantity of Tritium gas used as a neutron source in some warheads. Also, while it was discovered that it’s possible to do various things to unlock part (part!) of the arming mechanism of certain weapons, they still won’t go off unless they detect they are at the right altitude and so-on.