Which US Navy Ships Are Nuclear Capable?

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This episode talk about nuclear weapons on board US Navy ships.

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The views and opinions expressed in this video are those of the content creator only and may not reflect the views and opinions of the Battleship New Jersey Museum & Memorial, the Home Port Alliance for the USS New Jersey, Inc., its staff, crew, or others. The research presented herein represents the most up-to-date scholarship available to us at the time of filming, but our understanding of the past is constantly evolving. This video is made for entertainment purposes only.

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49 thoughts on “Which US Navy Ships Are Nuclear Capable?”

  1. A guy I knew in college went into the submarine service (this was the late 80s), and he told me that for his first deployment, his berth was on top of a nuclear-tipped torpedo. I asked him, what do you use a nuclear-tipped torpedo against, and he said "Fleets".

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  4. Without getting into classified areas, I can tell you that the two weapons used at the end of WWII were estimated to be of the order of 20 Kilotons yield, or less. That is FAR below the threshold of what US Nuclear doctrine up until the end of the Cold War said was tactical. "Tactical" and "Strategic" have very specific meanings to the armed forces, and they relate to the size or yield of the warhead only.

    Nonetheless, the use of the weapons at the end of WWII was clearly strategic.

    I wrote a research paper as a college senior (based solely on documents in the public domain which offered credible estimates of the yields of the various warheads in the US Arsenal), which argued that there was no such thing as "Tactical Use" of a nuclear weapon. The crux of my argument was that ANY use, particularly any FIRST use, no matter how comparatively minuscule the yield, was Strategic, if for no other reason than the likelihood of retaliatory use, and escalation.

    40+ years later, I stand by my argument and conclusions.

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  6. Nuclear depth charges (actually bombs designed to be dropped from P-3 Orion and Nimrod ASW aircraft on submarines)!

    There was a number forward deployed during the Cold War in Britain to be handed over for UK sub hunters.

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  8. Nuks on board ships… my first ship was a boomer tender, so we had both
    Polaris and Posiden ICBM's, as well as Mk 48 ADCAP torpedos, to resupply the forward deployed subs. As for surface ships, I remember one torpedo man I was talking to that commented that his destroyer carried small warhead torpedos in their ASROC launcher. Since almost everything from cruisers down had ASROC launchers in the 60's to 80's, it's a good bet that most of them had one or two torpedos when they were forward deployed. Ahh, the "good old times" of the Cold War, and "Mutual Assured Destruction".

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  9. I have to wonder, would it be possible to use a launch console like this to arm a missile, if, say, a nuclear warhead equipped missile were to be stolen? Or, is there something in the console that was removed and destroyed, such that it looks complete, but can't arm missiles? Or, is it that by the time a warhead is stolen, finding a console like this becomes a moot point, as it is by far the least of your problems?

    I would think most security is surrounding the warhead itself.

    Also, I think it would be an interesting video to show a step by step of how nuclear launch permission is given. Going from authorization to firing/launching. That is something I'd be very curious about.

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  14. I'm not sure there were ever nuclear torpedoes on surface ships. the Mk46 torpedoes were never secured or guarded which would tell me they were not nuclear or possibly ever had the capability to be. There was a nuke payload on some ASROC rockets in the form of nuclear depth charges called RTDC (rocket thrown depth charges). Those were heavily guarded when loading or unloading. The same goes for the TLAM-N variants. When we left the shipyard after over haul on USS CARON (DD-970), were were loaded with 2 TLAM-Ns just before deploying for Desert Storm but they were removed before we deployed.

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  15. if you think the gov has gotten rid of all the nukes on all navy ships, your straight up crazy….what the gov tells the people is not reality, its what the people want to hear.

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  16. Ryan.. Port tube 2 starboard tube 1.. my best approximation of where those home runs from the firing lock go… or are supposed to go.. maximized protection for any 'potential' nuclear payload. Inboard on the box launchers.

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  19. There's one thing you can count on — given any type of secretive massively destructive weaponry, the U.S. military will deny having it in use while simultaneously having as many of it deployed as possible. And the more unacceptable it is in civilized society, the harder they'll work to hide it.

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  20. When we think about 5000 warheads, that would probably mostly be the carriers and subs. If Ryan's right (and he generally is) on 100 or so per carrier, we had 12 or more active fleetcarriers throughout the Cold War. We have 11 now… And that's a minimum – we ended WWII with 24 Essexes and the three Midways coming online, plus a couple of one and two offs (Enterprise, Saratoga, etc.). Let's say 30 fleet carriers at the end of the war, plus or minus, declining to 11 by 2024, on a more or less continuous decline (maybe with a few spikes like Reagan's 600 ship Navy). Some of those are going to be in dry dock at any given time, but that still suggests that there were 1000 or more nukes deployed on carriers for much of the Cold War.

    Every SLBM since Poseidon (Poseidon, Trident C4, Trident II D5) can carry at least eight warheads, and most of them probably did during the height of the Cold War (a substantial number of warheads have been removed in the past decade or two). We had 18 Ohio class boats during the latter part of the Cold War, and with their dual crews, quite a few of them (2/3???) were active at any one time. At 192 warheads per boat, that's 2304 warheads right there.

    Every one of those Trident (or Poseidon earlier in the Cold War) warheads is strategic. There have been studies on tactical (or even conventional) warheads for Trident missiles – but the problem is that the instant a Trident missile rises from the deep, everybody it might be aimed at has to ASSUME it's a strategic missile and retaliate as if it is. If you don't, you might not be able to when your capital disappears. Some percentage of the carrier bombs may also be high-yield strategic weapons (or they may all be tactical – I don't know the answer to that)…

    That leaves one or two thousand nukes OTHER than SLBM warheads and carrier-borne bombs (etc. – I'm sure at least a few of the "bombs" on the carriers were depth charges, and some more may have been torpedoes, air to air missiles and other items). Three hundred and some were Tomahawks, and the rest were probably assorted tactical nastiness, largely aimed at permanently sinking submarines…

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  25. When I was in the Navy, my first boat I was assigned, the USS Salt Lake City, was certified and authorized to carry nuclear weapons. Officially speaking, I cannot confirm nor deny that nuclear weapons were ever carried aboard the USS Salt Lake City.

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  26. I grew up near Earl Naval Base in New Jersey.I could see all kinds of ships dock there. I was two blocks from the railroad. I still can hear the locomotive switcher with only one boxcar in tow. Also a helicopter doing slow orbits. 🍻🇺🇸

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  29. And that slimy worm Putin is warning the entire planet he'll do end times with these barbaric weapons if he doesn't get his way. I'm pretty sure we have the means under water (submarines….) to turn the USSR, or Russia, into a crater several times over.

    It was and is pure madness!

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  31. It so cool someone from your family was at Bikini. We can't really imagine what it looked like. My father was at the Bikini tests and 3 others when he was in the Navy. He was at Ivy Mike, too.
    I wish I could see the battleship. Sometimes you know the right people and I got to board a floating drydock in MS that had a frigate raised in it. That was cool. I'd rather walk under a battleship, though. I hope the tickets are a sellout and as many people as possible get to walk under her.
    Anyone know anything about ball caps in the Ship's Store online?

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  32. In 1985 the New Zealand government refused permission for the USS Buchanan (DDG-14) port visit. Although the Buchanan was conventionally power, it was capable of carrying nuclear weapons and the US Navy refused to confirm or deny it was carrying nukes.
    This policy continued until 2016 when the USS Sampson (DDG-102) visited Auckland.
    This video helps explains why this was allowed, if US warships no longer carried non-strategic nuclear weapons.

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  33. So when they removed nuclear capability was it just as simple as you said, ripping out a console? Or was there more involved than that? Like could they have just stuck the consoles in closets and plugged them back in if needed?

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  35. The wildest type of nuclear weapon deployed by the US Navy? I'd say the Regulus missile submarines. They had to surface and move the missile from the hangar to the launcher, then fire the missile. They were then supposed to prep and fire a second missile. I used to work with a guy who served on USS Barbero, one of the five Regulus subs. According to him, it was generally accepted by the crew that there was almost no chance they would survive long enough to fire the second missile.

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  41. I don't hear anything wrong with how Ryan pronounces "nuclear". Sounds normal to me. Also, my relatives from Missouri tended to pronounce it "Missourah". I figure he's doing that on purpose as a bit of a joke. 😁

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  42. I was on US CV's and CVN's in the late 80s early 90s. For one I never would have thought we would have had 100 nuclear bombs on board. 😳 Makes you think a bit more about the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) in the documentary "The Final Countdown". I don't know what the requirements would have been for them to be able to use those weapons but they could have easily won WWII with that many warheads.

    Anyway, I remember one of the WT's (weapons techs) transitioning over to being a CT around the time we deployed for Desert Storm. At that point it was George H.W. Bush's police that we wouldn't carry nukes and since the WT had a high security clearance he was switching rates. Or so I assume.

    I was in the space that the nukes used to be in after they were removed. Pretty spacious.

    I was under the impression that the anti-ship tomahawk was removed from service pretty early on. Wikipedia says 1994 but my deployments before that by a few years we were under the impression that they were already gone. When you are on a carrier you aren't too concerned about your escorts needing long range anti-ship cruise missiles.

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  45. Well officially, I’ve been instructed to say that I can confirm with an eye, the presence of any nuclear weapon on board any naval ship or sub, but I do know I was on a Garcia class, fast frigate, and we did have nuclear armed asrok

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  48. I was stationed on a submarine repair ship in Mediterranean in the early 80's. The weapon techs that were off duty always watched the reload ops and would try to be the first one to id what was being loaded. I watched every sub launched weapon in service be loaded, including sub-launched mines that they identified as having nuclear warheads installed.

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