|
The W-71 nuclear warhead was a US thermonuclear warhead developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and deployed on the LIM-49A Spartan missile, a component of the Safeguard Program, an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense system briefly deployed by the US in the 1970s. The W-71 warhead was designed to intercept incoming enemy warheads at long range, as far as from the launch point. The interception took place at such high altitudes, comparable to low earth orbit, where there is practically no air. At these altitudes, x-rays generated by the nuclear reactions can destroy incoming reentry vehicles at distances on the order of , which made the problem of guiding the missile to the required accuracies much simpler than earlier designs that had lethal ranges of less than . The W-71 warhead had a yield of around . The warhead package was roughly a cylinder, in diameter and long. The complete warhead weighed around .〔(Allbombs.html entry on W71 ) at (nuclearweaponarchive.org ), Accessed June 6, 2007〕 The W71 produced great amounts of x-rays, and needed to minimize fission output and debris to reduce the radar blackout effect that fission products and debris produce on anti-ballistic missile radar systems. ==Design== The W71 design emerged in the mid-1960s as the result of studies of earlier high-altitude nuclear tests carried out before the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. A number of tests, especially those of Operation Fishbowl in 1962, demonstrated a number of previously poorly understood or underestimated effects. Among these was the behaviour of x-rays created during the explosion. These tended to react with the atmosphere within a few tens of meters at low altitudes (see rope trick effect). At high altitudes, lacking an atmosphere to interact with, the mean free path of the x-rays could be on the order of tens of kilometers. This presented a new method of attacking enemy nuclear reentry vehicles (RVs) while still at long range from their targets. X-rays hitting the warhead's outermost later will react by heating a thin layer of the material so rapidly that shock waves develop that can cause the heat shield material on the outside of the RV to separate or flake off. The RV would then break up during reentry. The major advantage of this attack is that it takes place over long distances, as great as , which covers the majority of the ''threat tube'' containing the warhead and the various radar decoys and clutter material that accompanies it. Previously the ABM had to approach within less than of the warhead to damage it through neutron heating, which presented a serious problem attempting to locate the warhead within a threat tube that was typically at least a kilometer across and about ten long.〔 Bell received a contract to begin conversion of the earlier LIM-49 Nike Zeus missile for the extended range role in March 1965. The result was the Zeus EX, or DM-15X2, which used the original Zeus' first stage as the second stage along with a new first stage to offer much greater range. The design was renamed Spartan in January 1967, keeping the original LIM-49 designation. Tests of the new missile stated in April 1970 from Meck Island, part of the Kwajalein Test Range that had been set up to test the earlier Nike Zeus system. Because of a perceived need to rapidly deploy the system, the team took a "do it once, do it right" approach in which the original test items were designed to be the production models.〔 The warhead for Spartan was designed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), drawing on previous experience from Operation Plowshare. A nuclear explosion at high altitude has the disadvantage of creating a significant amount of electronic noise and an effect known as ''nuclear blackout'' that blinds radars over a large area. Some of these effects are due to the fission fragments being released by the explosion, so care was taken to design the bomb to be "clean" to reduce these effects. Project Plowshares had previously explored the design of such clean bombs as part of an effort to use nuclear explosives for civilian uses where the production of long-lived radionuclides had to be minimized. To maximize the production of x-rays, the W-71 is reported to have used a gold tamper, rather than the usual depleted uranium or lead. The lining normally serves the primary purpose of capturing x-ray energy within the bomb casing while the primary is exploding and triggering the secondary. For this purpose, most any high-z metal will work, and depleted uranium is often used because the neutrons released by the secondary will cause fission in this material and add a significant amount of energy to the total explosive release. In this case the increase in blast energy would have no effect as there is little or no atmosphere to carry that energy, so this reaction is of little value. The use of gold maximizes the production of x-rays as gold efficiently radiates thermal x-rays (see Moseley's law). This efficient release of x-rays when heated is the same reason that inertial confinement fusion experiments like the National Ignition Facility use gold-covered targets. In Congressional testimony on potential dismantling of the W71, a DOE official described the warhead as "a gold mine". Another advantage of using a gold tamper and lining is that neutron capture events generally form Au-198 which has a half life of 2.697 days and beta decay energy of 0.41 MeV, which is in the hard x-ray to gamma ray spectrum. This helps reduce the nuclear blackout effects. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「W71」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|