The film “Oppenheimer” is in theaters. It’s the story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is credited as the father of the atomic bomb. Here’s a look at the history and current U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The U.S. nuclear warhead arsenal
Each point represents a nuclear weapon. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the U.S. nuclear arsenal includes over 3,800 weapons. About 1,740 deployed nuclear weapons are available for use.
The circles below show the blast radius of the Hiroshima atomic bomb compared with a modern hydrogen bomb.
The Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, was air burst 1,900 feet above the city to maximize destruction; it was later estimated to yield 15 kilotons. Two-thirds of the city area was destroyed. The population present at the time was estimated at 350,000, and 140,000 died by the explosion and its radiation.
In the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, the W88 warheads deployed on Trident II submarine-launched missiles have an estimated yield of 475 kilotons.
How it began
The atomic bomb was tested only once — an event Robert Oppenheimer said brought to mind words from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
The concept was simple: driving together enough uranium or plutonium at high enough speeds will create a “critical mass” so quickly that it will start an uncontrolled, nearly instantaneous chain reaction of neutrons knocking apart atomic nuclei.
Only 1.09 kg of the 64 kg of uranium in Little Boy became energy.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has story on Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project here.
World’s nuclear warhead stockpile
Seventy-five years after the atomic flash set fire to Hiroshima, thousands of nuclear weapons sit in arsenals around the world, ready to deploy by aircraft or missile. The Arms Control Association estimates that there are nearly 14,000 such weapons, and that the United States and Russia account for the most by far: 6,185 for the United States and 6,490 for Russia, although of these only a third or so could be immediately used in a war.
The United States spends nearly $50 billion a year on its nuclear weapons.
Since 1945, more than 2,000 nuclear explosive tests have been carried out around the world.
The world’s two biggest nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, have not tested any nuclear weapons since 1992. Other countries trying to develop their own arsenals have carried out tests more recently.
The first series of thermonuclear tests took place on Nov. 1, 1952, on the small Pacific island of Elugelab at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The explosion yielded an energy equivalent of 10 megatons of TNT, an amount roughly 1,000 times as large as that released by the Hiroshima bomb.
Sources: Nuclear Explosion DataBase, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, World Economic forum, UNESCO, Atomic Heritage Foundation, Union of Concerned Scientists, Britannica
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