Man attempted to donate nuclear missile in garage to military museum

boing
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protects those on the outside, amirite?

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They’ve been duly warned…

Sign says, woo, stay away fools
'Cause love rules at the love shack
Well it’s set way back in the middle of a field
Just a funky old shack and I gotta get back

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I’m curious as to what the bomb squad was going to do with a nuclear missile as their typical MO is to detonate devices with a controlled explosion😂

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“controlled”.

I envision this, but bigger.

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FWIW, this has already been discussed in the Odd Stuff thread, and the unanswered question was whether the missile still had its solid fuel motor or not.

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Fortunately, there was no warhead attached.

Not sure how fortunate that is, since you can also say “we don’t know where the warhead is”.

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The number of actually lost US warheads (entire thing with core and all) can be counted on your hands. (Tybee island, Philippine Sea, Thule AB, USS Scorpion). We have done significant efforts towards recovery of bombs when they get lost to ensure they don’t get taken by people we would rather not have them. The only times we haven’t is when it’s infeasible to actually do so.

This was a decommissioned missile. Part of that process is removing the warhead. Generals have been fired for warheads moving bases when they weren’t supposed to be.

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I somehow had forgotten that James Earl Jones was in that movie. Must be time to rewatch it.

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src

Various amoral people thought that nuclear warheads would obviate the need for a direct hit.

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Unlike typical homemade bombs a police bomb squad deals with, a nuke is meant to be difficult to set off unless absolutely intended to.

The conventional explosives in the primary core (basically a miniature version of the Hiroshima “Fat Man”) are tested to survive falling out of the sky at high altitudes without accidentally going off.*

So they probably just leave it alone and wait for the Air Force to pick it up

*Stuff I learned from family vacations to Oak Ridge Labs and Kirkland AFB as a kid.

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It’s like that old “missile command” video game. In some versions of that game you can damage parts of your own city if your missiles detonate too close to the ground, but that’s generally still better than allowing an enemy missile to hit the ground.

Sure, military planners were making all kinds of amoral calculations, but be honest I don’t really blame the people who came up with that idea. Given that nukes already existed, they desperately wanted to come up with some kind of defense, and missiles that had a high likelihood of making a direct hit on a high-altitude enemy bomber were initially beyond the technology of the day. They worked with what they had available. Such a system that’s designed primarily for defense on one’s own territory is infinitely more justifiable than a large ICBM that’s designed to level a city full of civilians half a world away.

It’s very fortunate for all of us that these things never needed to be used.

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One wonders. And, welcome!

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I was mostly being facetious, but that was interesting, thanks.

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Whereas the dissolution of the USSR was chaos, and it wasn’t exactly known for transparent record keeping and timely international disclosures.

TBF as far as I know, anything still kicking about from 1989 has gone well stale.

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I am not a nuclear physicist, but I think that even if the tritium has decayed and fusion fails, you’re still dealing with a fission bomb.

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Even if the fission bomb fails, it’s still a dirty bomb

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And if the chemical explosives fail, it’d still hurt if you dropped it on someone’s foot because they’re heavy suckers. /s

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