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Mace, a Los Alamos Secondary Device
I’ve been trying to put together a list of device codenames, determining what the devices are, what era they are from and then tying them to a lab. Of course, the holy grail is to identify what weapon they are associated with. I have listed some here with varying levels of certainty: But the device…
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Julin Divider, the Last US Nuclear Test
At 8:04:00.0 Nevada time (15:04:00.0 GMT), on the 23rd of September 1992, the United States conducted its last nuclear test. The shot, codenamed Divider and conducted as part of Operation Julin, had a yield of 5 kt and was a Los Alamos National Laboratory device. Ten days prior, the US senate had passed 55-40, an…
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Some details on the W62, XW63, XW65 and W70 Warheads
The W62 and W70 warheads were developed by Lawrence Livermore in the mid to late 1960s. The W62 warhead — housed in the Mark 12 reentry vehicle — was the MIRV warhead for Minuteman III and saw service from 1970 to 2010. The W70 was the nuclear warhead for the Lance tactical ballistic missile which…
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UK Polaris warhead: W58 or W59 derived?
The UK’s Polaris program began after the cancellation of the US GAM-87 Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile in December 1962. The UK had intended to purchase the missile to be the backbone of their nuclear deterrent and the US cancellation of the system caused substantial diplomatic friction between the UK and US. As a consolation, the…
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Some Details on the W67/Mark 17
There’s not much out there on this system. Hansen for example has a grand total of two paragraphs on the system in Swords. In it, he describes it as the warhead for Minuteman and Poseidon before being cancelled in preference to the W68, that it had a yield of 150 kt and that it was…
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Cougar — The Primary of the B61 Bomb
The codenames for US nuclear devices are difficult to track. Usually, the primary and secondary stages have separate codenames and generally they are classified when associated with a specific weapon, but in some instances, they have been declassified and in others they have slipped through the cracks during declassification. Hansen in Swords of Armageddon provides…
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The W86 Earth Penetrating Warhead
The Pershing II was a medium-ranged ballistic missile system with a range of 1,750 km, first deployed in 1983 to Western Europe and retired by 1991 due to the signing of the Intermediated-Ranged Nuclear Forces Treaty. It was a two-stage missile and the only US weapon to be deployed with a manoeuvrable reentry vehicle (MaRV).…
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The W87’s Radiation Case
Alex Wellerstein wrote an excellent blog post called How not to redact a warhead in May 2021. In it, he revealed how in a redacted document from 1999, someone did not redact the document properly, allowing people to reveal some details about some of the weapons in the report by fiddling with the contrast. Los…
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Analysis of 1963 DCI Briefing to Joint Chiefs of Staff
Alex Wellerstein, who runs the blog Restricted Data and is well known for having created NUKEMAP, last year shared a few pages from document he obtained over on r/nuclearweapons. The document is DCI Briefing to Joint Chiefs of Staff dated 30th of July 1963 and marked top secret restricted data. It apparently came from someone…
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Super Octopus
This blog begins with a fascination with the secret of the modern nuclear weapon. If you take a look at the work of the two greats of public nuclear weapons sleuthing; Chuck Hansen — the author of The Swords of Armageddon[1], and Carey Sublette — the author of the Nuclear Weapons Archive[2], you will find…