Last of Largest Ever American Nukes Disassembled

The end of the B53 nuclear bombs brings the era of insanely powerful nuclear bombs to an end. Now, for those regularly powerful bombs ...

The United States is disassembling the last in a line of the country's largest ever nuclear bombs as part of a nuclear arms' reduction strategy. The nine-megatonne, 4,500 kilogram B53 bombs were first created at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s, and were about 600 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of the Second World War. Their massive megatonnage was meant to destroy enemy facilities hidden deep underground, but thankfully they never had to be deployed. While the B53s have been retired from the U.S. arsenal since 1997, a number remained lying around until President Barack Obama resuscitated efforts to take the entire line of bombs out of service for good. The next biggest bomb in the U.S. arsenal is the B83, which boasts a piddling 1.2 megatonnes of raw explosive power.