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October 10, 2006
Big trouble in a small package
Drudge had a headline earlier, citing reports that "experts" were saying that the North Koreans had not detonated a nuclear bomb; the seismic signature too small to signify an atomic blast.
However, other experts raised the possibility of a suitcase-type bomb, the Holy Grail of jihadis (can Muslims look for the Holy Grail?): a man-portable nuke. "Don't worry," we're told by more experts, "there's no such thing as a suitcase nuke. They're too bulky and heavy to fit into a piece of luggage."
Would that it were so. Almost 50 years ago, the U.S. was testing a nuclear weapon that could be carried by one man and launched from a jeep or a tripod.
This is the Davy Crockett, first tested in the early 1960s by the U.S. Army.
The W54 warhead used on the Davy Crockett weighed just 51 pounds and was the smallest and lightest fission bomb (implosion type) ever deployed by the United States, with a variable explosive yield of 0.01 kilotons (equivalent to 10 tons of TNT, or two to four times as powerful as the ammonium nitrate bomb which destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995), or 0.02 kilotons-1 kiloton. A 58.6 pound variant -- the B54 -- was used in the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), a nuclear land mine deployed in Europe, South Korea, Guam, and the United States from 1964-1989.
The Russians reportedly have lost control of somewhere between 50 and 100 tactical nukes, and should they no longer be serviceable, the North Koreans might have tested one of their own, seeing as how the seismic signature being derided by the nay-sayers is consistent with a nuke comparable in size to the Davy Crockett.
Wretchard has a number of links to information evaluating the possiblity of the NorKos becoming the newest member of the nuclear club, with pint-sized city-killers.
Posted by Mike Lief at October 10, 2006 12:36 AM
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