Topic: Military history/Weaponry (Page 2)
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π Davy Crockett (nuclear device)
The M-28 or M-29 Davy Crockett Weapon System was the tactical nuclear recoilless gun (smoothbore) for firing the M-388 nuclear projectile that was deployed by the United States during the Cold War. It was one of the smallest nuclear weapon systems ever built, with a yield between 10 and 20 tons TNT equivalent (40β80 gigajoules). It is named after American folk hero, soldier, and congressman Davy Crockett.
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- "Davy Crockett (nuclear device)" | 2018-09-15 | 58 Upvotes 59 Comments
π M65 Atomic Cannon
The M65 atomic cannon, often called "Atomic Annie", was an artillery piece built by the United States and capable of firing a nuclear device. It was developed in the early 1950s, at the beginning of the Cold War, and fielded, between April 1955 and December 1962, in West Germany, South Korea and on Okinawa.
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- "M65 Atomic Cannon" | 2019-11-10 | 47 Upvotes 49 Comments
π The Apollo Affair
The Apollo Affair was a 1965 incident in which a US company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), in the Pittsburgh suburbs of Apollo and Parks Township, Pennsylvania was investigated for losing 200β600 pounds (91β272Β kg) of highly enriched uranium, with suspicions that it had gone to Israel's nuclear weapons program.
From 1965 to 1980, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated Zalman Shapiro, the company's president, over the loss of 206 pounds (93Β kg) of highly enriched uranium. The Atomic Energy Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), other government agencies, and inquiring reporters conducted similar investigations, and no charges were ever filed. A General Accounting Office study of the investigations declassified in May 2010 stated "We believe a timely, concerted effort on the part of these three agencies would have greatly aided and possibly solved the NUMEC diversion questions, if they desired to do so."
In February 1976 the CIA briefed senior staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) about the matter, stating that the CIA believed the missing highly enriched uranium went to Israel. The NRC informed the White House, leading to President-elect Carter being briefed about the investigation. Carter asked for an assessment by his National Security Advisor, whose staff concluded "The CIA case is persuasive, though not conclusive."
Some remain convinced that Israel received 206 pounds (93Β kg) or more of highly enriched uranium from NUMEC, particularly given the visit of Rafi Eitan, later revealed as an Israeli spy and who was later involved in the Jonathan Pollard incident. In June 1986, analyst Anthony Cordesman told United Press International:
There is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material.β
In his 1991 book, The Samson Option, Seymour Hersh concluded that Shapiro did not divert any uranium; rather "it ended up in the air and water of the city of Apollo as well as in the ducts, tubes, and floors of the NUMEC plant." He also wrote that Shapiro's meetings with senior Israeli officials in his home were related to protecting the water supply in Israel rather than any diversion of nuclear material or information.
A later investigation was conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (successor to the AEC) regarding an additional 198 pounds (90Β kg) of uranium that was found to be missing between 1974 and 1976, after the plant had been purchased by Babcock & Wilcox and Shapiro was no longer associated with the company. That investigation found that more than 110 pounds (50Β kg) of it could be accounted for by what was called "previously unidentified and undocumented loss mechanisms", including "contamination of workers' clothes, losses from scrubber systems, material embedded in the flooring, and residual deposits in the processing equipment." Hersh further quoted one of the main investigators, Carl Duckett, as saying "I know of nothing at all to indicate that Shapiro was guilty."
In 1993, Glenn T. Seaborg, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission wrote a book, The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon, Adjusting to Troubled Times which devoted a chapter to Shapiro and NUMEC, the last sentence of which states:
Distinguished as Shapiro's career has been, one cannot but wonder whether it might not have been even more illustrious had these unjust charges not been leveled against him.
Later U.S. Department of Energy records show that NUMEC had the largest highly enriched uranium inventory loss of all U.S. commercial sites, with a 269 kilograms (593Β lb) inventory loss before 1968, and 76 kilograms (168Β lb) thereafter.
At the prompting of Zalman Shapiro's lawyer, senator Arlen Specter asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to clear him of any suspicion of diversion in August 2009. The NRC refused, stating:
NRC found no documents that provided specific evidence that the diversion of nuclear materials occurred. However, consistent with previous Commission statements, NRC does not have information that would allow it to unequivocally conclude that nuclear material was not diverted from the site, nor that all previously unaccounted for material was accounted for during the decommissioning of the site.
In 2014, further documents about the investigation were declassified, though still heavily redacted.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing a cleanup of contaminated land at the site of NUMEC's waste disposal. The project was scheduled to be completed in 2015, but the discovery of a substantially larger amount of contamination resulted in a seven year delay. Excavation is now scheduled to begin in 2021, with an estimated project time of 10 years.
Discussed on
- "The Apollo Affair" | 2021-08-21 | 79 Upvotes 16 Comments
π Zip gun
Improvised firearms (sometimes called zip guns or pipe guns) are firearms manufactured other than by a firearms manufacturer or a gunsmith, and are typically constructed by adapting existing materials to the purpose. They range in quality from crude weapons that are as much a danger to the user as the target to high-quality arms produced by cottage industries using salvaged and repurposed materials.
Improvised firearms are commonly used as tools by criminals and insurgents and are often associated with such groups; other uses include self-defense in lawless areas and hunting game in poor rural areas.
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- "Zip gun" | 2018-09-15 | 50 Upvotes 36 Comments
π Fire balloon
An incendiary balloon (or balloon bomb) is a balloon inflated with a lighter than air gas such as hot air, hydrogen, or helium, that has a bomb, incendiary device, or Molotov cocktail attached. The balloon is carried by the prevailing winds to the target area, where it falls or releases its payload.
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- "Fire balloon" | 2016-09-16 | 69 Upvotes 16 Comments
π Unethical human experimentation in the United States
Unethical human experimentation in the United States describes numerous experiments performed on human test subjects in the United States that have been considered unethical, and were often performed illegally, without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests have occurred throughout American history, but particularly in the 20th century. The experiments include: the exposure of humans to many chemical and biological weapons (including infection with deadly or debilitating diseases), human radiation experiments, injection of toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children, the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners.
Funding for many of the experiments was provided by the United States government, especially the United States military, the Central Intelligence Agency, or private corporations involved with military activities. The human research programs were usually highly secretive, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.
The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975, and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.
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- "Unethical human experimentation in the United States" | 2016-09-29 | 24 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Unethical human experimentation in the United States" | 2013-10-08 | 36 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Unethical human experimentation in the United States" | 2013-02-19 | 5 Upvotes 14 Comments
π Zamburak
Zamburak (Persian: Ψ²Ω Ψ¨ΩΨ±Ϊ©β), literally meaning wasp, was a specialized form of self-propelled artillery from the early modern period, featuring small cannons fired from swivel-mounts on camels. The operator of a zamburak is known as a zamburakchi. The weapon was used by the gunpowder empires, especially the Iranian empires of the Safavid dynasty, Timurid Empire and Afsharid dynasty, due to the ruggedness of the Iranian Plateau, which made typical transportation of heavy cannons problematic.
The zamburak became a deadly weapon in the 18th century. The Pashtuns used it to deadly effect in the Battle of Gulnabad, routing a numerically superior imperial Safavid army. The zamburak was also used successfully in Nader's Campaigns, when the shah and military genius Nader Shah utilized a zamburak corps in conjunction with a regular artillery corps of conventional cannon to devastating effect in numerous battles such as at the Battle of Damghan (1729), the Battle of YeghevΔrd, and the Battle of Karnal.
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- "Zamburak" | 2020-07-13 | 52 Upvotes 28 Comments
π Rapatronic Camera
The rapatronic camera (a portmanteau of rapid action electronic) is a high-speed camera capable of recording a still image with an exposure time as brief as 10 nanoseconds.
The camera was developed by Harold Edgerton in the 1940s and was first used to photograph the rapidly changing matter in nuclear explosions within milliseconds of detonation, using exposures of several microseconds. To overcome the speed limitation of a conventional camera's mechanical shutter, the rapatronic camera uses two polarizing filters and a Faraday cell (or in some variants a Kerr cell). The two filters are mounted with their polarization angles at 90Β° to each other, to block all incoming light. The Faraday cell sits between the filters and changes the polarization plane of light passing through it depending on the level of magnetic field applied, acting as a shutter when it is energized at the right time for a very short amount of time, allowing the film to be properly exposed.
In magneto-optical shutters, the active material of the Faraday cell (e.g. dense flint glass, which reacts well to a strong magnetic field) is located inside an electromagnet coil, formed by a few loops of thick wire. The coil is powered from a pulse forming network by discharging a high-voltage capacitor (e.g. 2 microfarads at 1000 volts), into the coil via a trigatron or a thyratron switch. In electro-optical shutters, the active material is a liquid, typically nitrobenzene, located in a cell between two electrodes. A brief impulse of high voltage is applied to rotate the polarization of the passing light.
For a film-like sequence of high-speed photographs, as used in the photography of nuclear and thermonuclear tests, arrays of up to 12 cameras were deployed, with each camera carefully timed to record sequentially. Each camera was capable of recording only one exposure on a single sheet of film. Therefore, in order to create time-lapse sequences, banks of four to ten cameras were set up to take photos in rapid succession. The average exposure time used was three microseconds.
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- "Rapatronic Camera" | 2019-10-14 | 60 Upvotes 19 Comments
π Project Babylon
Project Babylon was a space gun project commissioned by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. It involved building a series of "superguns". The design was based on research from the 1960s Project HARP led by the Canadian artillery expert Gerald Bull. There were most likely four different devices in the program.
The project began in 1988; it was halted in 1990 after Bull was assassinated, and parts of the superguns were seized in transit around Europe. The components that remained in Iraq were destroyed by the United Nations after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
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- "Project Babylon" | 2022-11-24 | 47 Upvotes 30 Comments
π Gay Bomb
The "gay bomb" and "halitosis bomb" are formal names for two non-lethal psychochemical weapons that a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. The theories involve discharging female sex pheromones over enemy forces in order to make them sexually attracted to each other.
In 1994 the Wright Laboratory in Ohio, a predecessor to today's United States Air Force Research Laboratory, produced a three-page proposal on a variety of possible nonlethal chemical weapons, which was later obtained by the Sunshine Project through a Freedom of Information Act request.
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- "Gay Bomb" | 2024-04-15 | 28 Upvotes 22 Comments
- "Gay Bomb" | 2017-01-09 | 16 Upvotes 10 Comments