The W38 was an American
thermonuclear warhead
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 ...
used in the early to mid-1960s as a warhead for
Atlas
An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a region of Earth.
Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographic ...
E and F, and
LGM-25 Titan I ICBM
An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is a ballistic missile with a range greater than , primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more thermonuclear warheads). Conventional, chemical, and biological weapons c ...
s. It was first built in 1961 and was in service from 1961 to 1965. 70 were deployed on Titan I missiles and 110 on Atlas missiles. It used the Avco Mark 4 reentry vehicle.
The W38 was 32 inches (81 cm) in diameter and 82.5 inches (2 m) long. It weighed and had a design yield of 3.75
megaton
Megaton may refer to:
* A million tons
* Megaton TNT equivalent, explosive energy equal to 4.184 petajoules
* megatonne, a million tonnes, SI unit of mass
Other uses
* Olivier Megaton (born 1965), French film director, writer and editor
* ''Me ...
s with an airburst or contact
fuze
In military munitions, a fuze (sometimes fuse) is the part of the device that initiates function. In some applications, such as torpedoes, a fuze may be identified by function as the exploder. The relative complexity of even the earliest fuze d ...
.
The W38 was the first thermonuclear ICBM warhead developed by the UCRL (
University of California
The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...
Radiation Laboratory), which is now known as the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...
.
The W38 was superseded by the
Titan II missile family with a
W53
The Mk/B53 was a high-yield bunker buster thermonuclear weapon developed by the United States during the Cold War. Deployed on Strategic Air Command bombers, the B53, with a yield of 9 megatons, was the most powerful weapon in the U.S. nucle ...
warhead and 9
megaton
Megaton may refer to:
* A million tons
* Megaton TNT equivalent, explosive energy equal to 4.184 petajoules
* megatonne, a million tonnes, SI unit of mass
Other uses
* Olivier Megaton (born 1965), French film director, writer and editor
* ''Me ...
payload.
See also
*
List of nuclear weapons
References
External links
List of all US nuclear weapons
Nuclear warheads of the United States
Military equipment introduced in the 1960s
{{nuclear-weapon-stub