The last of the B53 nuclear bombs.
A relic of the Cold War will be no more. The B53 nuclear bomb, the most powerful atomic bomb ever developed by the United States, will be leaving America’s weapons stockpile. The last B53 nuclear bomb was dismantled at a Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas. The bomb was the centerpiece of America’s nuclear weapons arsenal from 1962 to 1997, when it was discontinued. The bomb was designed to bust up underground shelters and was dropped from the B-52 bomber.
“We knew going in that this was going to be a challenging project, and we put together an outstanding team with all of our partners to develop a way to achieve this objective safely and efficiently,” said John Woolery, the Pantex plant’s general manager.
Each B53 was 10,000 pounds and the size of a mini-van with a destructive power 600 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Due to the bomb’s 1960’s origins, the engineers that designed it have long since either died or retired, leaving Pantex with no experience on actually disassembling the thing. Pantex engineers actually had to design a system to take the B53 apart, with completely new tools and new safety procedures to separate the bomb’s 300 pounds of high explosives from its nuclear core. The nuclear cores will be stored at Pantex for the time being, until a suitable storage place is found.
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