The Mark 24 nuclear bomb was an American
thermonuclear bomb
A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a lowe ...
design, based on the third American thermonuclear bomb test,
Castle Yankee
Castle Yankee was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of American tests of thermonuclear bombs. It was originally intended as a test of a TX-16/EC-16 ''Jughead'' bomb, but the design became obsolete after the ...
. The Mark 24 bomb was tied as the largest weight and size nuclear bomb ever deployed by the United States, with the same size and weight as the
Mark 17 nuclear bomb
The Mark 17 and Mark 24 were the first mass-produced hydrogen bombs deployed by the United States. The two differed in their "primary" stages. They entered service in 1954, and were phased out by 1957.
Design and development
Design and develop ...
which used a very similar design concept but unenriched Lithium.
The Castle Yankee thermonuclear test was the first bomb to use enriched
Lithium-6
Naturally occurring lithium (3Li) is composed of two stable isotopes, lithium-6 and lithium-7, with the latter being far more abundant on Earth. Both of the natural isotopes have an unexpectedly low nuclear binding energy per nucleon ( for lit ...
isotope, up to perhaps 40% enrichment (the earlier
Castle Bravo
Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as part of ''Operation Castle''. Detonated on March 1, 1954, the device was the most powerful ...
test had used the same enriched lithium combination but was not weaponised i.e. was not built as a deployable bomb). The device tested was called the Runt II design; it was reportedly very similar to the Runt design tested in
Castle Romeo
Castle Romeo was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of U.S. nuclear tests. It was the first test of the TX-17 thermonuclear weapon, the first deployed thermonuclear bomb.
It was detonated on March 26, 1954, a ...
, other than the enrichment level.
Castle Yankee had a demonstrated yield of 13.5
megatons
TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. The is a unit of energy defined by that convention to be , which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a m ...
. The yield for the weaponized Mark 24 was predicted to be 10–15 megatons.
The EC24 bomb was a limited production run of the Castle Yankee test device, with 10 produced and stockpiled through 1954. The EC24 was and weighed . The EC24 was a purely free-fall bomb design.
Design
The production model Mark 24 nuclear bomb was long, with a weight between . It was in service between 1954 and 1956, with a total of 105 units produced. The Mark 24 included a parachute to slow its descent.
The bomb used manual in-flight insertion (IFI) that required a crewmember to crank a handle that was inserted into a hole in the nose of the bomb. This process inserted the weapon's pit into the implosion assembly.
Survivors
A Mark 24 casing is on display in the
Castle Air Museum
Castle Air Museum is a military aviation museum located in Atwater, California, United States adjacent to Castle Airport, a former United States Air Force Strategic Air Command base which was closed in 1995, after the end of the Cold War. It is o ...
in
Atwater, CA
Atwater is a city on State Route 99 in Merced County, California, United States. Atwater is west-northwest of Merced, at an elevation of . The population as of the 2020 census was 31,970, up from 28,168 in 2010.
Geography
Atwater is in norther ...
.
See also
*
List of nuclear weapons
This is a list of nuclear weapons listed according to country of origin, and then by type within the states.
United States
US nuclear weapons of all types – bombs, warheads, shells, and others – are numbered in the same sequence starting wi ...
*
Nuclear weapon design
Nuclear weapon designs are physical, chemical, and engineering arrangements that cause the physics package of a nuclear weapon to detonate. There are three existing basic design types:
* pure fission weapons, the simplest and least technically ...
*
Teller-Ulam design
A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a lowe ...
*
Mark 17 nuclear bomb
The Mark 17 and Mark 24 were the first mass-produced hydrogen bombs deployed by the United States. The two differed in their "primary" stages. They entered service in 1954, and were phased out by 1957.
Design and development
Design and develop ...
*
Castle Yankee
Castle Yankee was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of American tests of thermonuclear bombs. It was originally intended as a test of a TX-16/EC-16 ''Jughead'' bomb, but the design became obsolete after the ...
References
Allbombs.htmllist of all US nuclear warheads a
nuclearweaponarchive.org* Chuck Hansen, ''U. S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History'' (Arlington: AeroFax, 1988)
{{United States nuclear devices
Cold War aerial bombs of the United States
Nuclear bombs of the United States
Military equipment introduced in the 1950s