nuclear weapons

It turns out that when Lehman Brothers went belly-up last fall, it was left with a lot more than just irate investors and billions of dollars in debt. One of the bank’s remaining assets is a sizable supply of yellowcake—the type of uranium that is enriched for use in nuclear reactors and weapons.

U.S. nuclear warheads might have been technological marvels a half-century ago, but today they're akin to a fleet of '57 Chevys — at least according to those who say the U.S. arsenal is begging to be traded in for a new model called reliable replacement warheads, or RRW.

For the last half-century, the U.S. has maintained its 5,400-warhead arsenal by replacing degraded plastic and rubber parts. But the most important part of the warhead — its explosive radioactive core — naturally decays over time and has not been replaced.

The warheads will remain dependable for at least 82 more years, or until the year 2091, according to a 2006 report by JASON, an independent scientific advisory group for the U.S. government. At that point, the warheads’ decayed cores could leave the U.S. with an impotent nuclear arsenal. "The concern is, can we keep the nuclear arsenal safe, reliable and effective for as long as we’ll need nuclear forces?" says John R. Harvey, a physicist in the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

The Federation of American Scientists has created two tools to estimate the destructive impact of a nuclear “bunker buster” bomb. The blast-effects calculator illustrates the immediate destruction that occurs in the moments following a detonation. Specify bomb yield and location, and the calculator produces a blast diagram superimposed over a satellite image of the selected city. Use the fallout calculator to trace the four-day radiation pattern that results from the initial blast.