Inside the Most Expensive Nuclear Bomb Ever Made
A flight test body for a B61-12 nuclear weapon
Engineers at the United States' nuclear weapons lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have spent the past few years designing and testing the B61-12, a high-tech addition to our nation's atomic arsenal. Unlike the free-fall gravity bombs it will replace, the B61-12 is a guided nuclear bomb. A new tail kit assembly, made by Boeing, enables the bomb to hit targets far more precisely than its predecessors.
Using "Dial-a-yield" technology, the bomb's explosive force can be adjusted before launch from a high of 50,000 tons of TNT equivalent to a low of 300 tons—that's 98 percent smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima 70 years ago.
Despite these innovations, the government doesn't consider the B61-12 to be a new weapon but simply an upgrade. In the past, Congress has rejected funding for similar weapons, reasoning that more accurate, less powerful bombs were more likely to be used. In 2010, the Obama administration announced that it would not make any nuclear weapons with new capabilities. The White House and Pentagon insist that the B61-12 won't violate that pledge.
The B61-12 could be deployed by the new generation of F-35 fighter jets, a prospect that worries Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists. "If the Russians put out a guided nuclear bomb on a stealthy fighter that could sneak through air defenses, would that add to the perception here that they were lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons?" he asks. "Absolutely."
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/nuclear-weapon-obama-most-expensive-ever
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It was developed in the late fifties and deployed in the early 1960s. 
Then I found out only drunken Facebook friends of Dick Cheney who are members of Carlyle Group are eligible:
What the Top 1-Percent Has Done For Us
PS: Great to read ya, jeff47! Thank Trump, Democracy has a real chance.
That show communicated so much more than Wagon Train to the Stars it's ridiculous.
On Tuesday.
Great to read ya, hunter! Have you gone ashore at Memory Alpha?
PS: About those lifeboats, see Mr. Carlucci. Tell them "Carlyle" sent you.
And this particular nuke can be 'dialed down' to produce a relatively small blast. We aren't talking Tsar Bomba levels here. Makes nuclear warfare almost...civilized....almost....
And the quality of workmanship in paint jobs for these babies, as they preen in front of their adoring fans for a publicly shoot, is without parallel.
America does make exceptionally pretty weapons of mass destruction.
Look at this laughably ugly piece of shit the Russians make:
Remember the Bunker Busters? Seems to me that the only reason for the dial a crater model would be to leave a nice cone of radiation. But I'm no nuclear physicist. 
Who's a good little peace keeper?
The plutonium from old obsolete bombs is recycled to make new bombs. A proper accounting is difficult.
The Manhattan Project itself took two paths -- uranium enrichment and plutonium production. The physicists knew with a great deal of certainty the U-235 bomb would work, but these uranium bombs were extremely expensive and also extremely dangerous, the sorts of things that could go off in an airplane crash or other accident.
Plutonium bombs were less expensive, and the chances for an accidental nuclear explosion almost nil.
The uranium enrichment facilities did, however, prove to be very useful in making highly "enriched" fuel for many sorts of nuclear reactor designs, especially reactors for nuclear powered ships and submarines.
Of course in post World War II U.S.A. terms like inexpensive and expensive in military spending lose all meaning; it's just a big black hole trillions of dollars have been shoveled into, without any proper accounting. What's the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush worth? It cost billions to build it, it will cost billions to run it, and it will cost billions to decommission it. For what?
