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 lo ...

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 geogra ...

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 ...

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 megatons 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 ...

. 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, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, University of Califor ...

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 The W38 was superseded by the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 The Titan II was an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) developed by the Glenn L. Martin Company from the earlier Titan I missile. Titan II was originally designed and used as an ICBM, but was later adapted as a medium-lift space l ...

missile family with a W53 warhead and 9 megaton payload.

References

External links

List of all US nuclear weapons
Nuclear warheads of the United States Military equipment introduced in the 1960s {{nuclear-weapon-stub

See also

References

External links