Still working the Orion pulse unit & M388 “Davy Crockett” nuclear projectile drawings, but they are now at a point where it’s not embarassing to show ’em. The pulse unit is from the General Atomic design for the 10-meter USAF vehicle, and had a yield of about 1 kiloton. The M388 used a version of the W54 warhead, and had a yield of only 0.01 to 0.02 kilotons. However, other versions of the same basic W54 warhead had yields of up to a kiloton. The Davy Crockett dialed it back for two main reasons:
1) Low yield like this means *really* filthy. The Davy Crockett was designed to make a mass of the foreseen Soviet invasion of western Europe through the Fulda Gap; nuking the bejeebers out of the troops and turning the region into a frighteningly radioactive wasteland was thought to be an effective way of slowing the tide.
2) The range of the M388: pathetic. Down to one slim kilometer. While one can survive a 1 kiloton nuclear blast at a range of one kilometer… one would not want to try.
The Orion was to use existing nuclear explosive designs in the early stages, so it’s safe to assume that the W54 – which, as it happens, was designed by the same guy who designed the pulse units – was the expected basic nuclear explosive. And a comparison of the pulse unit to the M388 shows that they compare quite nicely.
The interior of the M388 as shown here is a bit sparse. Oddly, the DoD is not especially forthcoming with technical information regarding the interior configurations of their nuclear weapons. Strange. Additionally, posted below are three half-ass decent photos… the best versions of ’em I could scrape off the Intarweb tubes. Even with actual units on display at the museums at West Point and Fort Benning (and an oddly painted one at Aberdeen), there are surprisingly few photos of this thing on line.
Anybody near Fort Benning or West Point, and have a camera?
Now, be honest: who *wouldn’t* want one of these hanging from the ceiling, or sitting on the coffee table? Or loaded with a big solid rocket motor and a chute? Or stuck on the end of a big-ass spud gun?
8 Responses to “Nukes!”
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The reason the Aberdeen one is oddly painted (“Hi There”, nuclear warhead, handle with care) is because that’s the name and stenciling on the H-bomb Colonel Kong rides down to destruction in Dr. Strangelove:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Dr.-Strangelove.jpg
The other H-bomb was “Dear John”, although in the book version it’s “Lolita”, after Kubrick’s movie.
When you look what they’ve got there, it looks like the ultimate panzerfaust.
Considering that the projectile is supposed to spend 17 seconds in the air after firing according to the YouTube video, I’d hate to be standing behind the launcher’s venturi nozzle when it went off, because they must have used a hell of a lot of propellant to get it to go that fast and high.
I always suspect that this was an offshoot of a small fission primary used to detonate the secondary fusion stage of a thermonuclear weapon.
Considering that the main kill mechanism was supposed to be radiation, this may be one of the first neutron bomb designs.
Gunston’s “Rockets and Missiles” book gives some idea of the big plans the Army had for this weapon originally; in 1960, the Titanium Metals company stated that they expected to use a total of 5,000,000 pounds of their alloys to make Davy Crockett launch tubes by 1964.
They ended up making 2,100 of the warheads.
The British also used Davy Crockett under the name “Wee Gwen”:
http://www.nuclear-weapons.info/vw.htm#Wee%20Gwen
> this was an offshoot of a small fission primary used to detonate the secondary fusion stage
Unlikely. While the details are a bit muddied, the W54 was designed in large part by Ted Taylor. Ted Taylor’s Reason For Being was not big-ass H-bombs, but to advance the state of the art in pure fission devices. IIRC, he never had a hand in designing H-bombs, but always pure fission devices.
How does that bomblet compare with the Deep Impact spacecraft’s copper impactor disk? About the same size?
The problem I had with Phil Plait’s Bad Universe series is that he caled for nukes only to be used as a last resort, yet the gravity tractor would require a looping ROSETTA type catch up trajectory, perhaps being in space a decade or more before the mission could ever begin. And the gravity tractor mission itself would take a long time, not even including transit.
Deep Impact was a flyby type mission, meaning a smaller LV. Deep Impact with an Orion bomblet that was specifically made to move a big, heavy object seems to fit the bill.
I think what you have with Kaku, and especially Melosh–is that they are anti-nukes.
The very idea of the Earth being saved with a liquid fueled booster–thank you von Braun–fitted with an Ed Teller era nuke with SDI technology (I would want kill-vehicle type thrusters on the bomblet to make sure of a good hit) is so anathema to liberals as to be untenable, so they fall all over themselves to come up with rube goldberg contraptions.
I’m betting that a lot of these anti nukes were also Griffin haters. The problem is that for a gravity tractor or kinetic hit to have effect, the spacecraft itself must be a pretty good fraction of the asteroids mass. An Ares V would be needed to have a fuel fat vehicle needed to shove with any authority, or launch the solar sails/reflectors Melosh and others want.
But that means they need to support HLLV development. Naturally they don’t want any money for LV development, since they are used to chain-smoking Deltas.
Or they can stick with Delta IIs and learn to love the bomb, because that is the only way to pack enough mass-energy into a payload shroud not much wider than my waistline.
Since they like neither HLLVs nor nukes, they’re stuck, and have to come up with crazy schemes that would waste time and money, and may not even work at all.
One last question. In the book on Orion Ted Taylor had a disturbing thought about a new weapon or other, but told nothing to Dyson. I forget the page of the book, but something occured to him that I would like to find out about…
Would that be related to Casaba Howitzer?
That was a concept to use a Orion type pulse unit on a missile as a antisatellite system by firing the vaporized tungsten at a target rather than the Orion driveplate.
Taylor states here that he worked on boosted fission weapons:
http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/23198.html
But not true H-bombs as such.
A longer version of the other Youtube video I linked to shows a lot more info on a Davy Crockett attack, this time employing three launches and both the long and short range launchers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv_q8q6Z9_I
It mentions that non-nuclear ranging rounds are fired at the target (smoke or HE of some sort?) to get everything right before the nuclear rounds are sent in.
The rather naive concept of using standard brooms to decontaminate the troops doesn’t take into account that the more you brush them, the more radioactive dust will come off of them into the air, where they can inhale it.
Showers would make a lot more sense, or at least giving them some sort of filters to wear over their mouth and nose while you go over them with the brooms.
> Would that be related to Casaba Howitzer?
Read all about it in issue V2N2 of Aerospace Projects Review (hint, hint): http://www.up-ship.com/blog/eAPR/index.htm
> non-nuclear ranging rounds are fired at the target (smoke or HE of some sort?)
Notice the smaller tubular devices under the main gun tube? Those are either 20mm or 37mm spotter guns, firing finned projectiles with identical ballistics to the nuclear projectile. They could also fire a conventionally-armed version of the M388 projectile, with 16 pounds of high explosives in an old-school spherical steel “bomb” (that’s what’s shown in my drawing).
I was trying to figure out what the thing under the barrel was; it looked like some sort of gas bleed system.
The concept reminds me of the ranging rifles on the Ontos vehicle that let you figure out where the 106 mm rounds were going to hit when they were fired.
Actually, you wouldn’t even need to shoot a real Davy Crockett at the enemy to make them flee; an inert one falling out of the sky would scare the living shit out of them if they recognized what it was.
Another case where a loud ticking sound emanating from it would really add to the effect. 😀