Walter Pincus’s Washington Post article, “Story of B-53 ‘bunker buster’ is a lesson in managing nuclear weapons,” provides a fascinating look at the arcane and highly secret history of U.S. nuclear weapons planning. Pincus shows that the highly dangerous, massively destructive B-53 stayed in the nuclear arsenal for decades because of its mission: the destruction of underground bunkers. Weapons designers concocted the B-53 after U.S. intelligence had identified the underground installations that would house Soviet leaders in time of superpower crisis and war. Yet the B-53 was so dangerous that practice loading of them on B-52 bombers was forbidden. If a substantial quantity of B-53 had been used in war, their radioactive fallout would have caused worldwide environmental damage. Production of some 300 B-53s began in 1962, but by the end of the Cold War the Pentagon kept only 50 in the active stockpile. They were not retired until the late 1990s when a replacement, the B-61-11, came on line. Until recently the B-53s could not even be disassembled like other retired weapons; Washington had no plan for safely disaggregating the dangerous chemicals and highly-enriched uranium in the weapon’s core. Such problems informed Pincus’s lesson: “Don’t build more weapons than you need or could use.” (more…)
