Managing Nuclear Knowledge: Last Cold War Bomb Dismantled  Mon,
11/07/2011 - 8:16am Lindsey Christensen, Marketing Project
Manager, Guest Journalist, PTC  The National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA) is dismantling the last of its Cold War
era nuclear bombs, and the process is a complicated and
dangerous one.  Photo from BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives   As
you would imagine, the process is a complicated and dangerous
one. The work is being done in a Texas plant dedicated to
disassembling the nuclear bombs, and they are finally down to
the last one -- a B53.  The B53 ‘bunker buster’ weighs 10,000
pounds and is 12 feet in length, 50 inches in diameter.
Accord­ing to the Fed­eration of American Sci­entists it is 600
times more powerful than the atom­ic bomb dropped on Hi­roshima,
Japan, at the end of World War II. Blast effects would be
sufficient to collapse most residential and industrial
structures within a 9.3 mile radius; within 3.5 miles virtually
all above-ground structures would be destroyed and