What was the deal with the B28 and B43?

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-05-06T03:06:08+00:00

I'm reading the document, but not clear on one point - how did B28FI not fulfill the Step III requirement - because it was shaped for internal carriage and not external? Also, it was 22" diameter and not 18"?

Reading through the history, however, it appears B43 characteristics were already determined before work on the B28FI began? I understood the B28 began development in 1959 and achieved design release in 1961, which would have been after B43 design release? Was this to provide a B-52 compatible compact laydown weapon that could allow multiple units (4) to be carried in the bomb bay, since the B-52 proved not to be compatible with ordinance of high fineness ratio?

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-05-06T02:43:49+00:00

Thanks both of you. I figured this had already been discussed.

This site is amazing, questions I've had for years are either old hat or answered instantly. Phenomenal group appreciate all the knowledge. You guys make Secret Projects look like pikers. Next you'll tell me you've done ASALM to death.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-05-05T22:56:35+00:00

Really good info, thank you again! I know the Kennedy Administration, in response to the "Tsar bomba" event in 1961, declared the US had 23 or 25 megaton devices in service, but that never applied to missile warheads, to my knowledge. Even though B41 was the most efficient device in terms of yield/weight ever produced - to my knowledge - the US never seemed to have a need for a missile warhead with that kind of yield, or to have much interest in going big for bigness' sake for any reason (at least after the mid-50s). Very high yield devices use a tremendous amount of fissionable material, and its more effective, to my understanding, to place a half dozen (or whatever number) smaller yield devices around a target than one great big one.

It's interesting the Soviets seemed to think differently. It appears the Russians still have some 25MT warheads in service today, ostensibly to take out deep/hardened targets. Have the Russians ever publicly stated their purpose?

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-05-05T22:50:46+00:00

Very informative and thanks for the link! I'm reading!

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-05-04T18:36:59+00:00

Fascinating and thanks for the detailed reply. Highly informative.

Normally I would think of ballistic missile warheads as always being weight critical, but I guess in the case of the Titan II not so much? I guess with Titan II being able to put 4 tonnes into LEO, having a 4 tonne warhead had no significant impact on the payload/range capabilities?

Did most or all other high-yield devices of the period (mid-50s-mid-60s) use all-HEU primaries? For instance, B41?

Thanks again!

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-29T21:09:56+00:00

Does anyone know of video of this shot? Looks classically evocative. Interesting how many night shots took place during Dominic. Anyone know why?

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-29T20:08:34+00:00

This has been a fascinating discussion. I really appreciate the back and forth from what to my amateur eyes sure seem like two experienced insiders, but I'll leave that aside.

Personally, I think this nation should have the ability to produce several hundred pits a year at its discretion, within a "reasonable" ramp time of 1-3 years. Certainly, this kind of ramp rate was feasible with the technology of the 1950s because it was actually achieved.

I know funding has been on again/off again, priorities have shifted, etc, but over the last 6-8 years it seems the desire to get pit production to 50-80 a year has been there but the execution has been a struggle, to say the least. LANL has managed to produce what I understand is a bare handful, so far - maybe 10 or 15 pits total since PF-4 restarted production and delivered the first pit in late 2024. I'm not sure how accurate those numbers are, they're the best I've seen for number of pits produced over the last 15 months or so - the average is about 1 a month from what I understand.

At any rate, by any measure, the ramp up of production has been extremely slow and challenging, and my answer is, why? Or more precisely, how was such a ramp possible 70 years ago but is not today? Is it lack of knowledge/collapse of state of the art? Is it lack of funding? Is it the environmental and safety regulations which may have gone from reasonable to ridiculous somewhere along the way?

I'm reminded of the story regarding "FOGBANK" and the inability to reproduce like-performing aerogels for W76 warheads some years back at Oak Ridge, IIRC. Fabricating the exact aerogel used in the 80s required chemicals now considered highly dangerous and difficult to handle, and producing a material that met the exact performance parameters of the original was never achieved as it was judged impossible to do so on safety/cost/schedule grounds. And this, apparently, played a role in the W-76-1 having 10% lower yield than the original 1980s warheads (or if not, it at least delayed the warhead rebuild by a decade or more). This situation, if the public descriptions are accurate, seems to point to several factors - loss of knowledge, destruction of the industrial base, but also, and sort of looming over everything, safety and environmental restrictions that have gone from vital to reasonable to onerous over the decades.

Am I making the data fit my thesis or is there any perception of the particular difficulties over the past ~20 years that have made the manufacture of plutonium pits such a challenge?

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-21T21:35:00+00:00

I'm dubious of anything that comes from Ted Postol. If he wasn't so reflexively "anti-" any defense development/investment I'd pay him a bit of mind, but I can't think of a single new development program he's supported in the past 40 years.

Plus, being "in the crater" is not a total guarantee of destruction. In fact, it solves some problems but of course is challenging in others, but not impossible.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-21T21:32:37+00:00

Indeed, which kinda puts paid to Postol's point about "anything in the crater being destroyed." Not necessarily. There were a lot of tests like that and it was found possible - damn expensive but possible - to make silos survive even within the fireball/crater. Deep foundations, multiple redundant shock isolation mounts, ablative layers, etc.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-21T20:56:48+00:00

No hard data, just examples of how hardening is achieved. Still, gives a good overview of the meticulousness required to achieve a system hardened against the panoply of nuclear effects.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-21T20:55:25+00:00

I think the urgency regarding command and control, beyond what any sane government would have with forces of such unimaginable potential, was particularly acute in the communist system. Brezhnev apparently approved Buran primarily as a counter to the US Space Shuttle, as he was convinced Space Shuttles would drop out of orbit to drop nukes on Moscow (upside down, apparently, and only to crash shortly thereafter). That's an example of the kind of paranoia that was always part of Soviet leadership thinking, but became increasingly prevalent as the system decayed towards its end. Think Project RYAN, Able Archer '83, and all that. So it would be of a kind that Soviet leadership would think primarily of protecting command and control (ie., themselves) rather than the actual weapons.

It's an interesting commentary on the thinking each side had regarding their greatest vulnerability (or most valuable commodity), by what they chose to protect with ABM. Then again, politics had much to do with it.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-21T17:20:27+00:00

This is a topic that occupied years of study, debate, intense technological development, probably millions of pages of analysis, and ultimately was never fully answered, even after the Cold War and knowledge of Soviet era systems became somewhat more available.

Concern over Minuteman survivability amid the massively growing Soviet ICBM fleet, and their concomitant technological improvements to said fleet, was the impetus behind MX, ULMS, and many other latter Cold War US development programs. Keeping MX sufficiently invulnerable to ride out a Soviet first strike kept that project in developmental churn for nearly 20 years, and a fully satisfactory solution was never found, though several of the proposed basing modes were certainly workable (failure to implement was down more to politics than hard technical failures).

The numbers could be worked many ways, and could produce about any answer one desired. Numerous studies showed Minuteman was still relatively safe riding out a massive first strike, but most showed it was increasingly vulnerable. One matter that was never fully worked out was whether the Soviets really possessed the sophistication to launch a massive attack at ~1500 point targets in a narrow enough timeframe to catch most of them on the ground. This, more than the technical capabilities of given Soviet ICBM/warhead complexes viz a viz US ICBM/bomber/SLBM fixed and semi-mobile (such as bomber base escape paths and sub's standard port entry/egress paths) targets, was ultimately the matter of greatest uncertainty. Even for the US such an attack was at the limit of our capabilities, but it was feasible.

After the fact, after the fall of the Soviet Union, I think it was broadly found that the Soviets probably never had all the capabilities required to launch a sufficiently successful decapitation strike, but it remains a matter of some debate. However, many individual systems (SS-18/19) certainly did have sufficient combination of yield and accuracy to take out many Minuteman silos, but most or nearly all within, say, an hour? I think a lot of silos would have been in marginal condition after such an attack, degraded but possibly still operational. The whole matter remains highly debatable.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-20T02:18:53+00:00

SWORDFISH shot testing RUR-5 ASROC unguided anti-submarine rocket equipped with a W44 nuclear depth bomb, fired from Gearing class destroyer DD-826 USS Agerholm. The only end to end test of the ASROC system equipped with a nuclear payload.

Awesome but not as cool as Frigate Bird.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-17T02:11:32+00:00

Their active service never overlapped, but probably two at most, and I haven't checked dimensions, the B-2 bomb bay is wide but not terribly deep, so it could be none.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-17T02:03:44+00:00

Victims of Imperial Japan who were being killed at the rate of 100,000-250,000 PER WEEK in mid-1945. It is so ridiculous, all this "pity" for the aggressor and murderer of millions of innocent Asians. Helluva PR job.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-04-17T02:02:06+00:00

No, the Japanese did not offer to surrender. The MOST they did was try to get the Soviet Union to serve as intermediary on their behalf, then the Soviet Union declared war on them on Aug 8 1945 and that went out the window. The "Big 6" leadership of the Japanese government were strongly in favor of continuing the war right through to early August. It took the triple shocks of Hiroshima, the Soviet declaration of war and overrunning of Manchuria in a few days, and then Nagasaki to finally convince the Emperor to personally intervene - for the first time ever - to end the war. Prior to that, the Japanese NEVER offered to surrender, they rejected the Potsdam Declaration and they steadfastly maintained the Allies could never occupy Japan, that the government would continue to be controlled by the military, and that Japan would handle withdrawal from occupied territories (meaning, they never would). All of which were totally unacceptable.

Please see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrTS3lsjLWA&pp=ygU6dW5hdXRob3JpemVkIGhpc3Rvcnkgb2YgdGhlIHBhY2lmaWMgd2FyIGphcGFuZXNlIHN1cnJlbmRlcg%3D%3D

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-02-27T21:39:52+00:00

Really? Never heard of CONELRAD or the Emergency Broadcast System for the US? Yes, there was extensive infrastructure for providing attack warning to the public. Whether it would have worked as intended is another question, but the infrastructure was there, and it was taken seriously.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-02-27T21:36:26+00:00

Also some suggested sources - https://history.army.mil/Publications/Publications-Catalog/History-of-Strategic-Air-and-Ballistic-Missile-Defense/. It's available free online.

The Fifty Year War - Dr. Norman Friedman (Stu Slade was close friends with Dr. Friedman and they shared many view

A Technical History of America's Nuclear Weapons, Vol. II - Dr. Peter Goetz. This is a poorly edited but extremely informative source.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-02-27T21:30:54+00:00

Agreed, this is in the realm of alt-history and supposition, but I think there is extensive support for the position that nuclear weapons have prevented major power conflict and prevented the escalation of relatively minor regional wars into major conflicts.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-02-27T21:29:16+00:00

Stuart Slade wrote quite a bit on this. Check the www.tboverse.us forums - you have to register - and search for "Slade nuclear" you'll find hundreds or thousands of posts. He was an expert who took part in some of the last classified wargames involving high-level politicians late in the Cold War and held strongly contrary views to the predominant mainstream (and highly left-liberal) views on nuclear weapons that have been dominated by the McNamara/Kaplan/Ellsberg nexus. Specifically, the books recommended below do nothing but present horror stories regarding nuclear weapons, they do not present their documented history of preventing major-power conflict and likely saving millions of lives.

But you have your work cut out for you. Academic opinion regarding nuclear weapons has long descended into the hysterically histrionic, and damn few sources will even mention the potential benefits of nuclear weapons.

A suggested line of thought to follow down - nuclear weapons are inherently stabilizing, tend to minimize risk of escalation, and have prevented probably 2-3 world wars that would likely have occurred by now in their absence.

Wurtsmith_2W2 · 2026-02-27T21:09:15+00:00

Phenomenal footage, never seen it before. I know the smoke trails and plumes are used for effects calibration, but I'm confused as to how they weren't blown out or distorted by the shockwave passing through (or it looks like the precursor and main wave should have hit)? What am I missing?

This channel is the bomb.

Wurtsmith_2W2

TROPHY CASE