The National Nuclear Security Administration has dismantled the nation’s last remaining B53 nuclear bomb, completing the removal of the massive bomb from the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The agency completed the dismantlement during a ceremony at its Pantex Plant yesterday, removing the high explosives from the plutonium pit on one remaining B53 bomb and detonating the high explosives at one of the plant’s firing facility. The B53, a behemoth of a bomb that weighed in at approximately 10,000 pounds and was the size of a minivan, was retired from the nation’s stockpile in 1997, but experts have estimated that approximately three dozen of the bombs were awaiting dismantlement up until the Pantex Plant began to dismantle the remaining B53s last year. Pantex officials would not say how many of the bombs it dismantled over the last year, but said it was “less than 50” in an interview with NW&M Monitor Monday. The dismantlement was completed approximately a year ahead of schedule.
RadWaste Monitor Vol. 11 No. 8
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Morning Briefing
Article of 8
March 17, 2014
LAST B53 BOMB DISMANTLED
With an estimated yield of nine megatons, the B53 was a vestige of the Cold War, and NNSA Administrator called the completion of the dismantlement program “a significant milestone” in the Obama Administration’s nuclear security agenda. “The world is a safer place with this dismantlement,” D’Agostino said in a statement. “The B53 was a weapon developed in another time for a different world. Today, we’re moving beyond the Cold War nuclear weapons complex that built it toward a 21st-century Nuclear Security Enterprise.”
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