State Department Confirms FAS Warhead Estimate

[bananas]

Source: FAS

The U.S. State Department has confirmed the estimate made by FAS on this blog in February that the United States had already reached the limit of 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads set by the 2002 Moscow Treaty. The confirmation occurred earlier today in a fact sheet published on the State Department’s web site: “As of May 2009, the United States had cut its number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 2,126.”

This is a reduction of 77 warheads from the 2,203 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads deployed on February 5, 2009, and probably reflects the ongoing retirement of the W62 warhead from the Minuteman III ICBM force, scheduled for completion later this year.

The total U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile includes approximately 5,200 warheads.

Read more: http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2009/07/confirmation.php

[Grinchie]

1. Just think of the canal they could dig across america!

Just by setting of a Nuke every mile or so, with a few extra thrown in for the Sierra's and the rocky mountains.

[zogtheobvious]

2. Oh, good idea. ;)

:nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke:

[Grinchie]

3. I stole the idea from a 1960's Popular Science...

[formercia]

4. Operation Plowshare

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OjxhDx-iuc

[Igel]

5. Or the larger Soviet equivalent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy

[formercia]

7. There were problems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy

--snip--

Problems

Among the most cited catastrophes was the Kraton-3 explosion in Vilyuy, Yakutia in 1978, that was supposed to unearth a large amount of diamond-rich ores. Instead the amount of diamonds was insignificant but the plutonium pollution of the water sources was much higher than predicted. According to Yablokov, the level of plutonium in the drinking water of Vilyuy region twenty years after the explosion is ten thousand times higher than the maximal sanitary norm.

Another catastrophe resulted from the Globus-1 explosion near village Galkino, 40 kilometers from Kineshma city on September 19, 1971.<4> It was a very small underground explosion of 2.5 kilotons that was a part of the seismological program for oil and gas exploration. Unexpectedly a large amount of radioactive gases went out through the cracks in the ground, creating a significant highly radioactive spot of two kilometers in diameter in the relatively densely populated area of European Russia. To make things worse, a small tributary of the Volga, the Shacha, changed its location and threatened to flood the very hole of the explosion. This could have led to nuclear pollution of the entire Volga region. Some engineers suggested building a sarcophagus (similar to the Chernobyl's "Object Shelter") over the place of the explosions and digging a 12 km channel to shift the Shacha river away from the place of the explosion, but the plans appeared prohibitively expensive.

The experiments came to an end with the adoption of a unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons at Soviet test sites in 1989. Although this primarily was designed to support Mikhail Gorbachev's call for a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons tests, the Russians apparently also applied the moratorium to peaceful nuclear explosions as well.

--snip--

[grantcart]

6. We could divide the moon into two orbs for greater asthetic balance.

[IndianaGreen]

8. Will any of you give me the authority to kill your entire family?

Why do we then give the President the authority to kill our entire families, our neighbors, the people in neighboring towns and cities, and the people in other countries that have not harmed us in any way? That's the insane concept behind our nuclear stockpile, that any President can destroy this planet for whatever reason he sees fit.