Talk:Mark 15 nuclear bomb

WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Tag & Assess 2008
Article reassessed and graded as start class. --dashiellx (talk) 15:22, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Lost bomb found hoax
There has been a mini edit war going on here lately about this. The issue ought not to revolve around whether or not the reports were a hoax, but rather around whether mention of the reports and about whatever controversy there is about their veracity has of sufficient topical weight to appear in the article. See W_:DUE. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 13:29, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

The reports being a hoax might be relevant to an article about the specific incident where a bomb was lost, and in the case of the Tybee bomb the article is written to reflect that a fake news article about the bomb being found was circulated on social media. It doesn't seem relevant to an article about a series of nuclear weapons used by the United States Military. On top of that, people aren't noting that a fake article was circulated, they are editing the article to say that the weapon was recovered and "haha, the article is badly written". This isn't an edit war as much as it is uncritical people making changes to the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brokenscope (talk • contribs) 00:20, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Transitional design
I'm going to disagree with the notion that the weapon was a "transitional design" and the idea of weapons using uranium tampers (dirty weapons) was in some way rare or unusual.

The weapon came in two yields: 1.68Mt and 3.8Mt, with one version roughly doubling the yield of the other. It's well known in other weapons that they often came in two versions: a lower yield "clean" version and a high yield "dirty" version. The W47 for example had a 600kt clean version and a 1200kt dirty version, the B41 had a clean ~9Mt version and a dirty ~20Mt version, the W87 has a 300kt yield with an unproduced variant with a yield of 475kt. There are more.

These are not rare, and in most cases going from clean to dirty roughly double the weapon's yield. Funnily enough, in the Mk15 one version has half the yield of the other... almost as if one is a clean version with an inert lead tamper and one is a dirty high-yield weapon.

This is not a "transitional design", it's simply a method for producing a higher yield weapon in a package the same size and weight, at the cost of having to use costly enriched uranium in the tamped instead of almost worthless lead. They are also known to have used lower enrichments of uranium or natural uranium in the tamper as a cost/yield/dirtiness compromise. This is likely the reason for the W87 not doubling the yield when using HEU: it's already using some lower enrichment of uranium.Kylesenior (talk) 06:56, 5 February 2021 (UTC)