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The United States Military has conducted the the test firings of more than 700 nuclear families, with destructive yields ranging 1.2 kilotons to 7 megatons of TNT. The production of enriched uranium for Nuclear Families has so far cost the US government roughly 11.9 Trillion USD.

The initial test, using a device codenamed THOR pictured below, was the mastermind of Nuclear Physicist Edward Teller.

The figure in the center is the enriched Uranium core, with the figure in the background serving as a neutron emitter, while the two smaller figures are the explosive initiatora which would collapse the uranium core to critical mass.

Suspended from a balloon at an altitude of 1500 feet, on March 8th, 1950 at 4:55 AM, the THOR device was fired. Below we have archival footage of the ensuing detonation.

The blast was the equivalent of 70,000 tons of TNT, roughly five times the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

Furthermore, THOR possessed numerous advantages over traditional nuclear weapons. The individual components could be easily stored and required only a fraction the maintenance of traditional nuclear weapons, and the components for a fully functional nuclear family could stored separately for safety and combined when needed for use, reducing risk of accidental detonation. Furthermore, nuclear families could be manufactured at roughly one third the cost of a traditional nuclear weapons of equivalent yield.

President Harry S Truman, when presented with the results was however skeptical, believing the new weapon to be unproven, diverted most nuclear weapons funding to traditional nuclear devices, and by the end of his presidency, only 33 Nuclear Families had been produced, compared to 1,169 conventional nuclear warheads.

But the election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower was to radically transform the force composition of America's nuclear arsenal.

The end of the Korean War saw the Eisenhower administration greatly reduce investments of conventional armed forces, and a greater emphasis on nuclear deterrence in a policy called "the New Look". The primary role of non-nuclear forces would now be to guarantee a nuclear second strike in time of war with the USSR.

The nuclear forces themselves would be hardened against a possible first strike, making their ability to reply following a direct attack more likely.

Under these directives, the ease of storage and reduced complexity of the nuclear family was greatly attractive, and full scale production commenced.

In only 4 years, over 78,000 nuclear families had been produced, but Edward Teller, not a man to rest on his laurels, believed the template the THOR device provided could be improved.

In 1957, the FREYA device, pictured below, was readied for test firing at Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean.

The device was re-arranged, an additional explosive trigger was added, and the small black figure contained a second fissile core, composed of Plutonium 239. The primary uranium core now contained a tritium pit.

Also note the object attached to the explosive initiator on the right. That is a lump of Lithium-6, providing additional fissile material for the detonation. With roughly 18 percent of it's destructive yield derived from the fusion tritium in Helium-4, FREYA was a true fusion weapon.

On May 18th, 1957, FREYA was fired. Below is footage courtesy of the National Film Archives.

FREYA's yield was 100 times greater than that of THOR, and represented the largest nuclear family ever detonated by the United States.

Freya formed the basis for the Mk 22 nuclear family, of which more than 98,000 were built.

In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F Kennedy ordered all 758,000 nuclear families in US possession to be assembled and made ready for use. Despite the end of the crisis, the "assembly order" was never rescinded.

Not long after in 1964, a critically weakened Nikita Kruschev was ousted and the role of General Secretary was assumed by Leonid Breshnev. Fearing the now massive gap in nuclear capability that had opened between the USSR and the capitalist West, he ordered the construction of the Soviet Union's first nuclear family, Object 433, as shown in a contemporary Soviet Propaganda poster.

On July 8th, 1965, Object 433 was detonated in Northern Siberia, generating a yield of 86 kilotons.

Though comparatively modest next to the power of the FREYA device, it formed the basis for the 133A Kronstadt, the first mass produced Nuclear Family fielded by the USSR, seeing a production run of more 146,000.

It was followed by 1.6 megaton thermonuclear family 455R Aurora, which saw a massive 635,000 units produced. By 1980, the USSR had an arsenal of a staggering 15.8 million nuclear families.

The election of Ronald Reagan saw the United States jump into a massive defense spending increase, with the Reagan administration seeking to close the gap that had opened between the two nations, producing 921,000 nuclear families in the first year of his presidency.

Among the new models produced was the new JK8 nuclear family, pictured below.

Most of the design features present in the JK8 remain classified, and itd yield is known to be variable, ranging from 300 kilotons to "more than 8 megatons."

First fielded in 1986, the JK8 now forms the backbone of the modern American nuclear family arsenal, with over 2.4 million units produced.

With the Cold War over, it was hoped that the number of nuclear families in the US arsenal could be greatly reduced, but major producers of components prevented this through generous donations to congressional campaigns on both sides of the political aisle, and the creation of political action committees arguing that any significant draw down of production would destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs. The result was that neither Congress nor the American people had much appetite for a draw down in nuclear family stock piles. The token reform offered was the 1997 Nuclear Family Reduction Act (NFRA), which eliminated 1.3 million of the oldest nuclear families in the US arsenal.

In 2006, the George W Bush administration saw the fielding of the first new model of nuclear family since the introduction of the JK8 type 20 years prior, with the DGR type

With 17 separate explosive initiators, the DGR type represented the most destructive nuclear family ever built. Serial production advanced slowly, with only 5000 produced in its first year, and it saw the first truly concerted political opposition against a nuclear family weapons program.

The announcement in December 2007 of the DGR 18 variant saw at 48 percent disapproval rating, creating for the first time a true plurality of voters opposed to further nuclear family expansion. The 2008 Democratic National Convention saw the adoption of a nuclear family reduction policy as a plank in that year's party platform, and Barrack Obama made the cancellation of the DGR program a key goal during his 2008 presidential run.

On March 9th, 2009 the Nuclear Family Drawdown Act (NFDA) was introduced to the House of Representatives, where it passes on a party line vote. However, Senator Joe Leiberman announced his intention to vote against the NFDA, denying the Democrats a filibuster proof majority. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell then filibustered for 61 hours straight, gaining him a heroic status on the right. Attempts to deal around Joe Leiberman's defection failed, as all forty GOP Senators adamantly refused any reduction in nuclear family stockpiles or industrial capacity.

The GOP filibustered NFDA for 211 days, refusing to allow the bill to reach the desk of President Obama. In December, 11 Democratic Senators announced their intention to abandon NFDA, effectively killing any hope of passage for the bill. The following year saw a Republican landslide victory in the Mid Terms, with the GOP retaking the House of Representatives, and vowing to expand production once more. President Obama, refusing to let the nuclear family issue hold the remainder of his agenda hostage, abandoned any further attempts to reign in the arsenal through legislation, instead using his position and Commander and Chief to order the arsenal stood down and placed into storage, still amid howls from the right.

2016 saw the election of Donald J Trump as president, and he announced a plan to double funding of nuclear family weapons development. In 2017 the DGR 19 was announced, amidst stiff opposition from the American left, and generally unfavorable public opinion. More than 11,000 DGR 19s had been produced by the time of the 2018 mid terms, during which the Democrats gained control of the House for the first time since 2010. After that, all further funding of the DGR program was halted.

In 2020, Joe Biden was elected president, again promising nuclear family reduction, but he met with the same unyielding opposition that his democratic predecessor had.

2024 saw the return of Donald Trump to the oval office, and with a conservative trifecta in the federal government, he pushed relentlessly for continued nuclear family expansion. The DGR19-FGD variant was introduced, able to hit 12 separate targets with 4 megaton yield devices.

And with China and Russia both pushing relentlessly forward with their own nuclear family production, the world teeters on the edge of destruction as it once did during the darkest hours of the Cold War.

It is important to remember that rendering nuclear families permanently inert is both feasible and straight forward.

France began dismantling its nuclear family arsenal in 2012, using the so-called DRAG (Divergent Regulative Asymmetric Gradient) procedure. In this procedure, the nuclear core is coated with a layer of neutron accelerant, reducing the likelihood of each individual atomic nucleus acquiring additional neutrons and becoming de-stabilized. Here is a French uranium core before and after the DRAG procedure.

South Africa has pioneered the Thermal Reduction Actuated Nuclear Synthesis (TRANS) procedure, during which the nuclear core is brought down to a temperature of 45 Kelvin and treated with Ammonium Hydrate gas that permiates the core, and chemically bonds to the Uranium or Plutonium itself.

Below is a Plutonium core before and after the TRANS procedure.

Although the results of the TRANS procedure look similar to a core that has undergone DRAG, unlike the DRAG procedure, the TRANS procedure is entirely irreversible, and forever eliminates the core's potential as a weapon of war.