America's new Guided - Nuclear bomb

[Wyatt earp]

I was reading this article is it possible that America would use it in war? It is low yield , highly accurate and what they say an air blast wouldn't kill millions of people but just a few hundred .....

The B61-12 also has a low-yield. As noted above, the bomb has a maximum yield of 50 kilotons. However, this yield can be lowered as needed for any particular mission. In fact, the bomb’s explosive force can be reduced electronically through a dial-a-yield system.

This combination of accuracy and low-yield make the B61-12 the most usable nuclear bomb in America’s arsenal. That’s because accuracy is the most important determinate of a nuclear weapon’s lethality (Yield of warhead^2/3/ CEP^2).

As one scholar explains: “Making a weapon twice as accurate has the same effect on lethality as making the warhead eight times as powerful. Phrased another way, making the missile twice as precise would only require one-eighth the explosive power to maintain the same lethality.” Furthermore, radiological fallout operates according to Newton’s inverse square law.

In practical terms, all this means that the more accurate the bomb, the lower the yield that is needed to destroy any specific target. A lower-yield and more accurate bomb can therefore be used without having to fear the mass, indiscriminate killing of civilians through explosive force or radioactive fallout.

 

[Wyatt earp]

Forgot the link

The Most Dangerous Nuclear Weapon in America s Arsenal The National Interest Blog

 

[Wyatt earp]

Thinking about this since the U.S. didn't bomb Assad over WMDs , is it possible we would use nukes like this in war again?

 

[waltky]

From someone who knows whereof he speaks...

Crusading Former Pentagon Chief: Nuclear Dangers Are Growing
Dec 29, 2015 | by Robert Burns > WASHINGTON -- Late in a life lived unnervingly near the nuclear abyss, William J. Perry is on a mission to warn of a "real and growing danger" of nuclear doom.

The 88-year-old former defense secretary is troubled by the risks of catastrophe from the very weapons he helped develop. Atop his list: a nuclear terror attack in a major U.S. city or a shooting war with Russia that, through miscalculation, turns nuclear. A terrorist attack using a nuclear bomb or improvised nuclear device could happen "any time now -- next year or the year after," he said in an interview with reporters earlier this month. Perry chooses his words with the precision of a mathematician, which he was before entering the defense world in the mid-1950s. He played a central role in developing and modernizing nuclear forces throughout the Cold War -- first as a technology whiz-kid and later a three-time senior Pentagon executive. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis Perry was secretly summoned to Washington to analyze intelligence on Soviet weapons in Cuba. "Every day that I went to the analysis center I thought would be my last day on earth," he writes in a newly published memoir, "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink." He says he believed then and still believes that the world avoided a nuclear holocaust as much by good luck as by good management.

Former Defense Secretary William Perry answers questions from guests during a dinner for technology industry leaders held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.​

In the interview, he recounted a harrowing incident in November 1979 when, as a senior Pentagon official, he was awakened by a 3 a.m. phone call from the underground command center responsible for warning of a missile attack. The watch officer told Perry his computers were showing 200 nuclear-armed missiles on their way from the Soviet Union to the United States. "It was, of course, a false alarm," Perry said, but it was one of many experiences throughout the Cold War and beyond that he says have given him a "unique and chilling vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security — they now endanger it." His views are remarkable, not least because they strike at the heart of the conventional wisdom about nuclear weapons that has been embraced by both political parties for decades. For example, Perry thinks the U.S. nuclear force no longer needs land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, and can rely on the other two "legs" of the force -- bomber aircraft and submarine-based missiles. ICBMs should be scrapped, he says, adding, "I don't think it's going to happen, but I think it should happen. They're not needed" to deter nuclear aggression.

He also opposes the Obama administration's plan to build a new nuclear-capable cruise missile. Perry looks at Russia's nuclear modernization and U.S. plans to spend hundreds of billions to update its nuclear arsenal and sees irrational nuclear competition. "I see an imperative to stop this damn nuclear race before it gets under way again, not just for the cost but for the danger it puts all of us in," he said. When the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Perry thought the world had dodged a nuclear bullet. In his first book, co-authored in 1999 with the man now running the Pentagon, Ash Carter, Perry argued that the demise of the Soviet system meant nuclear disaster was no longer an "A List" threat. By 2014, his optimism had faded, in no small part because of the collapse of cooperative relations between Washington and Moscow, which has ended any realistic prospect of new arms control agreements and, in Perry's view, has put the two countries on a dangerous path toward confrontation. "We are facing nuclear dangers today that are in fact more likely to erupt into a nuclear conflict than during the Cold War," Perry said in a recent speech.

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