Mark 24 nuclear bomb

Common card · No. 488423

The Mark 24 nuclear bomb was an American thermonuclear bomb design, based on the third American thermonuclear bomb test, Castle Yankee. 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 which used a very similar design concept but unenriched lithium. The Castle Yankee thermonuclear test was the first bomb to use lithium enriched with the lithium-6 isotope, up to perhaps 40% enrichment (the earlier Castle Bravo 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; other than the enrichment level, it was reportedly very similar to the Runt design tested in Castle Romeo. Castle Yankee had a demonstrated yield of 13.5 megatons. 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...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Public domain