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A quick and ugly graph I threw together for my class tomorrow — the US nuclear stockpile, 1945-1994, shown as warheads (red, left axis) and as the average megatonnage per warhead (green, right axis). Those Eisenhower years... they stand out a bit, eh?pic.twitter.com/rD33vIvFWI
More subtle on that graph, but easy to see on another (below): the JFK/LBJ years were characterized by continued stockpile growth, but the average yield decreased = huge increase in low-yield tactical weapons.pic.twitter.com/5gDF6t9nkc
Rookie question, but I've never understood this. I know smaller warheads allow fewer civilian casualties when used counterforce, but have we truly been living in a world where we expect most weapons would be used during the phase of caring about limiting casualties?
Or do other factors predominate? Just how much cheaper is it to build and maintain a 200kT weapon vs a 5MT one?
It's not about the expense of a 200 kt vs a 5 Mt weapon, it's about the volume and mass of the warhead. Even a very efficient 5 Mt weapon is going to weigh a lot more. If you can reduce the mass you can have way more flexibility with delivery vehicles (e.g., MIRVs, ALCMs, etc).
See my warhead yield-to-weight explorer — you can see that even with changing efficiency of the weapon, megaton-range weapons weigh a lot more than the kinds of missile warheads that became popular: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/betas/yieldtoweight/ … 100-500kt is sort of a "sweet spot" for warhead design.
How much of the decrease in yield can be explained by improvements in delivery systems? The strategic weapons are getting smaller too right, there weren't just more tactical weapons?
Right, it's both, after the 1960s, when they really figure out how to miniaturize H-bombs.
What if you overlay total megatonnage? That peaks post-eisenhower right?
What happened to 9000 MT in 1961?
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