The Mark 6 nuclear bomb was an American

nuclear bomb A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission or atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear weapon), producing a nuclear exp ...

based on the earlier

Mark 4 nuclear bomb The Mark 4 nuclear bomb was an American implosion-type nuclear bomb based on the earlier Mark 3 Fat Man design, used in the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki. With the Mark 3 needing each individual component to be hand-assembled by only ...

and its predecessor, the Mark 3 Fat Man nuclear bomb design. The Mark 6 was in production from 1951 to 1955 and saw service until 1962. Seven variants and versions were produced, with a total production run of all models of 1100 bombs. The basic Mark 6 design was in diameter and long, the same basic dimensions as the Mark 4. Various models of the Mark 6 were roughly 25% lighter than either the Mark 4 or Fat Man, and weighed . Early models of the Mark 6 used the same 32-point implosion system design concept as the earlier Mark 4 and Mark 3; the Mark 6 Mod 2 and later used a different, 60-point implosion system. Various models and pit options gave nuclear yields of 18, 26, 80, 154, and 160 kilotons for Mark 6 models.

Survivors

There are several Mark 6 casings on display: * Defense Nuclear Weapons School on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico *

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

Gallery of the

National Museum of the United States Air Force The National Museum of the United States Air Force (formerly the United States Air Force Museum) is the official museum of the United States Air Force located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, northeast of Dayton, Ohio. The NMUSAF is ...

Dayton, Ohio Dayton () is a city in Montgomery County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of cities in Ohio, sixth-most populous city in Ohio, with a population of 137,644 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. The Dayton metro ...

Museum of Aviation (Warner Robins) The Museum of Aviation is the second-largest aerospace museum of the United States Air Force. The museum is located just outside Warner Robins, Georgia (near Robins Air Force Base). , the museum included four exhibit buildings and more than 85 h ...

Warner Robins, Georgia Warner Robins (WRB; typically ) is a city in Houston County, Georgia, Houston and Peach County, Georgia, Peach Counties in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the state's Georgia (U.S. state)#Major cities, 11th-largest incorpo ...

* Hill Aerospace Museum in Ogden, Utah

Variants

Mark 13

The Mark 13 nuclear bomb and W13 missile warhead were developed as higher-efficiency Mark 6 successors, the same size and basic configuration as the Mark 6 but utilizing an improved 92-point implosion system. The Mark 13 was cancelled in August 1954 and the W13 cancelled September 1954, in both cases without ever seeing production service.

Mark 18

The Mark 18 nuclear bomb was a follow-on to the Mark 6 and Mark 13, utilizing a fissile pit assembly with around 60 kilograms of HEU and delivering a yield of 500

kiloton TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. A ton of TNT equivalent is a unit of energy defined by convention to be (). It is the approximate energy released in the det ...

s, the largest pure-fission (non-thermonuclear) bomb design ever developed by the US. Mark 18 bombs were eventually recycled into Mark 6 Mod 6 bombs after thermonuclear weapons were deployed in quantity. The Mark 18 was tested once in Operation

Ivy King Ivy King was the largest pure- fission nuclear bomb ever tested. The bomb was tested by the United States' Truman administration as part of Operation Ivy. This series of tests involved the development of very powerful nuclear weapons in respons ...

XM1 Atomic Demolition Munition

An Atomic Demolition Munition, the XM1 was developed. Few details on the system exist.

Gallery

File:18-15-019-mark-6.jpg File:Mark 6 bomb.jpg File:Mark 6 Nuclear Bomb and B-29 at Robins Museum (11345269833).jpg File:Mk 6 nuclear bomb.jpg File:XM1 ADM.jpg, The XM1 ADM that contained a Mark 6 nuclear warhead

References

External links

Allbombs.html
list of all US nuclear warheads a
nuclearweaponarchive.org
{{United States nuclear devices Mark 06 Nuclear bombs of the United States Military equipment introduced in the 1950s