The Surprising Afterlife of Unwanted Atom Bombs

What happens when old atomic bombs are retired? Last month, the Biden administration announced its intention to withdraw the nation's most powerful weapon from the U.S. nuclear arsenal. From a report: The bomb is called the B83. It is a hydrogen bomb that debuted in 1983 -- a time when President Reagan was denouncing Russia as "an evil empire." The government made 660 of the deadly weapons, which were to be delivered by fast bombers. The B83 was 12 feet long, had fins and packed an explosive force roughly 80 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Its job was to obliterate hardened military sites and command bunkers, including Moscow's. What now for the B83? How many still exist is a federal secret, but not the weapon's likely fate, which may surprise anyone who assumes that getting rid of a nuclear weapon means that it vanishes from the face of the earth. Typically, nuclear arms retired from the U.S. arsenal are not melted down, pulverized, crushed, buried or otherwise destroyed. Instead, they are painstakingly disassembled, and their parts, including their deadly plutonium cores, are kept in a maze of bunkers and warehouses across the United States. Any individual facility within this gargantuan complex can act as a kind of used-parts superstore from which new weapons can -- and do -- emerge.

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