Heh heh... somebody got the bright idea to make a plywood mockup showing the size of the bomb. Excuse me... the ACTUAL size. :D:D:D

Hey Earl... lemme git a picture... stand over there by the bomb.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1647500291.jpg

When I was a junior officer, I was an ICBM Missile Combat Crew Commander, then did "codes" for minuteman...and later served as the Nuclear Compatibility Engineer for several of our nuclear capable aircraft models before moving on to other things. While there were a lot of problems in the early days, we have some pretty good safeguards these days.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1647500877.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1647500894.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1647500907.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z2MYLBxT-s
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1647500920.jpg

MM1 is near and dear to my heart - I spent 8y studying with hopes to resurrect some safety features that it had, having been fielded during one of the test bans.

The same guts were in a bomb and we just, in the last five years or so, took the last few apart. I was at the "factory" in Amarillo and a dude had a 5 gallon bucket of reefing rings from their parachutes in his office. "Want some?" he asked. Of course the answer is obvious and I now have parts from a ginormous H-bomb sitting on my desk.

Way cool. I almost forgot that I have a 14-inch drive disc from the "Whopper" codes computer that once held the ICBM nuclear launch codes (demagnetized and the finish ground off it) made into a going away plaque...and a couple of stiff fingers (mild frostbite) from testing B-52s nuclear systems at Minot in the winter (and of course I tested ALCMs at Edwards (Hell on Earth) in the summer. Bass ackwards...considering climate.

Oh, and some of those funky blue flight suits/scarves and a combat crew badge and pocket rocket from my SAC daze.

Now that is a big removable disc (engraved names covered to protect the innocent).

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1647546044.JPG

I think "The History Guy" did an episode about that incident.

India has approximately 150 nuclear warheads Pakistan has approximately 160 warheads. Not a real comfortable situation given the geopolitics of that region. https://armscontrolcenter.org/countries/india-and-pakistan/

I think Russia has about 6000...as do we if you count the ones in storage. Similar situation.

We had, at least in 2004 when I and two colleagues had to inventory the 1800 item-deep account three (!) times thanks to one lost bar code label, had stacks of those as well as platter cassettes and even magnetic drum media. They'd finish up a nuclear test, grab the media, and shove it in a VTR. We even keep machines running that can read the stuff. At this point I bet it all can fit on a handful of SD cards, but rules on records are pretty strict.

Good times. It brought the 12,000 person site to a halt for three weeks. Full and complete stand-down thanks to our then retired desk-admiral (never a real command outside of an office) director. Not a lot of love for that dude here, even now...

They lost an atomic bomb near Tybee Island, not far from Savannah, Georgia. It’s still there somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_collision

Every few years someone thinks that they found it and our nuc safety people have to do yet another "dig it up or leave it there?" assessment. Luckily they've never found it, so the question hasn't been definitively answered yet.

Four years ago it turned out to be an iron bathtub that somehow fell off of a boat.

(it's probably pretty inert at this point, though the SNM might be of interest)

You do understand they have been at war in Kasmir since 1989.

The war kills me, since I had an opportunity to go to the lake boat in Kashmir in 1988.