A
plant in Texas has dismantled the last of America’s largest Cold
War-era nuclear weapons, a 10,000-pound B-53 bomb. Production of the B53
was halted in mid-1965 after more than 300 had been built at Pantex in
Amarillo, Texas, America’s only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly
facility. The National Nuclear Security Administration held a ceremony
at the Amarillo plant to commemorate the dismantlement of the final
bomb. The first B53s built in 1962 were intended as bunker busters. They
had a rear compartment containing five parachutes designed to bring the
bomb down softly so that its explosive power would send a shock wave
through the earth to collapse underground shelters. The bomb was
designed to deliver an explosion of 9 megatons, the equivalent of 9
million pounds of TNT, or 600 times the power of the bomb that destroyed
Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.
