Oh gosh I thought this was a news story from today. Nearly scared the crap out of me. Anyways, it really is amazing that the world hasn't seen an accidental nuclear explosion yet. Let's hope we never do.
Reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of explosive, atomic and thermonuclear weapons. Allow me to wax reflective; my grandfather started his war career at Pickatinny Arsenal and then ran the union at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory where he befriended Norris Bradbury and Carson Mark. My parents met in Jr High there in 1953; both of them worked for the company until retirement (my dad still does, he's just a "consultant" now). Suffice it to say I grew up around this stuff. - For starters Conventional explosives of the kinds used by the major forces are stupendously stable. Dynamite evolved from nitroglycerin; TNT evolved from dynamite, PETN evolved from TNT, RDX, Semtex, C-4 and the other critters in the menagerie evolved from PETN. Everything from TNT onward is flame-proof, crush-proof and largely shock-proof. In order to set off the more stable explosives (IE, everything used conventionally today) you need an explosive priming charge. Seen Die Hard? Remember all the foofrah about "detonators?" If you stuff a firecracker in a block of RDX it might go off. No guarantees. Stuff a blasting cap in it and boy howdy. Note that blasting caps are also useful for blowing up stumps, which should give you an idea of the amount of shock necessary to fire conventional explosives. Note also that one of my grandfather's projects was a bomb designed to go off days, weeks or months after it was dropped. In other words, weapons designed in WWII could be forcibly ejected from a B-17 at altitude, crash through a factory, hit the concrete, and not blow up until the acetic acid phial in the nose eroded through the plexiglas disk to trip a chemical reaction that would set off said blasting cap a month later. Or, you know, until you tried to move it, in which case the mercury switch that suddenly came active as soon as it hit the dirt and settled would blow you to hell and gone (the Nazis got around this by using Jews to carry off the bombs). - Additionally The explosives necessary to trigger an atomic reaction must be stable enough to get chucked into a lathe or mill and machined. Granted, they do this under pretty specific conditions and granted, shit does blow up occasionally but to make the lenses necessary to concentrate a critical mass of weapons-grade plutonium into a fissile pile, an impressive amount of precision is necessary and that doesn't much happen by pouring. Which means, for those following along at home, that in order to get a dropped atomic bomb to go off by accident, not only must the conventional explosives be triggered (see above) but they must be triggered without warping the lens or else you just have a dirty bomb. Fat Man and Little Boy didn't just happen - those are precision devices. Smash a bunch of weapons-grade plutonium together and yeah, you'll get a bang... but if you want one of those good'n'proper "mushroom cloud bangs" a whole lot of shit has to go right all at once. - Finally It takes conventional explosives carefully arranged to trigger an atomic explosion. It takes an atomic explosion carefully arranged to trigger a nuclear explosion. The thermonuclear weapons we use today - and have since the '70s - I knew some of the guys who designed this thing backintheday - are miracles of precision. An atomic explosion is one thing. A nuclear one is entirely another. Even after Oppenheimer had the Manhattan Project in the bag, there was doubt as to whether or not a nuclear explosion was possible. In addition to actually working, these are devices that are designed to be fired out of a submarine at nine or ten G, lofted to just this side of the Karman Line (although that's mostly because of treaties, hurtled through the exact same re-entry that always looks so impressive in Apollo 13 and then right in the middle of that pesky, tumultuous process, triggered in such a way that the conventional, the atomic and the nuclear explosions all happen in the proper order. Hell, some of them are designed to do this after cleaving through 30 meters of concrete. _ _ _ So. Yeah, it's a good thing we haven't had any accidental nuclear explosions due to weaponry, but it's not like we haven't had plenty of opportunities. This is not due to luck, it's due to the fact that nuclear weapons are pretty goddamn tough.Anyways, it really is amazing that the world hasn't seen an accidental nuclear explosion yet. Let's hope we never do.
Not to dismiss the potential severity of the North Carolina incident, but it seems like we're more likely to bring a nuclear apocalypse upon ourself through human error than engineering. Excluding the Cuban Missile Crisis, there have been a number of incidents where military men simply stayed calm in situations where radar and other equipment suggested every indication of an attack. Thankfully the psychology of mutually assured destruction kept those with their finger on the trigger thinking, "No, this cannot be right." I think the most recent was in 1995 when a Norwegian science experiment was mistaken for an incoming missile from the United States. Luckily the incident never escalated to Boris Yeltsin; had he been drunk at the time, who knows what part of the country would be a radioactive crater.This is not due to luck, it's due to the fact that nuclear weapons are pretty goddamn tough.
Exactly right.
Quite.
...it's a little more nuanced than that. One of the most frightening things about the Russian Coup was the already-fractious chain of command was broken into several pieces, all of which disliked each other intensely. The Soviets built the Dead Hand because their own wargaming indicated that they lacked the command and control hierarchy necessary to launch against the US in retaliation against a first strike. The delay between a NORAD confirm and a decision in front of the President is 18 minutes; the Soviets knew that upon launch detect they couldn't get their shit figured out in under half a day. They also knew that if they gave authority to the people who could retaliate in time, there would be hundreds of dudes in bunkers with the ability to start nuclear war whenever they wanted (a bad thing in a managed economy with a conscript army). So they gave it to the computers. To your broader point, Hollywood made Wargames into a movie. The USSR made the WOPRa reality. IT'S STILL RUNNINGNot to dismiss the potential severity of the North Carolina incident, but it seems like we're more likely to bring a nuclear apocalypse upon ourself through human error than engineering.
Excluding the Cuban Missile Crisis, there have been a number of incidents where military men simply stayed calm in situations where radar and other equipment suggested every indication of an attack. Thankfully the psychology of mutually assured destruction kept those with their finger on the trigger thinking, "No, this cannot be right."
I think the most recent was in 1995 when a Norwegian science experiment was mistaken for an incoming missile from the United States. Luckily the incident never escalated to Boris Yeltsin; had he been drunk at the time, who knows what part of the country would be a radioactive crater.
Huh. So what you're saying is what happened in the article is actually exceedingly rare, and we really shouldn't be worried? I guess it would be better to say that we should be happy no one has decided to set a nuke off yet (I'm thinking more terrorists or a rogue state), rather than worrying about a bomb randomly going off.
Couple things. 1) the source of this is a new book by Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation. This is his take on reading 50-year-old documents. 2) Here's the money-quote: " The only thing standing between us and an explosion so catastrophic that it would have radically altered the course of history was a simple electronic toggle switch in the cockpit, a part that probably cost a couple of bucks to manufacture and easily could have been undermined by a short circuit—hardly a far-fetched scenario in an electronics-laden airplane that's breaking apart." In other words, bad shit would have happened if the plane had broken apart and the arm switch in the cockpit had spontaneously fritzed. 'cuz if it had fritzed before the plane broke up, the pilots would have been all "holy shit we don't just got live nukes on board, we've got live, armed nukes on board." If it had fritzed after the plane broke up, nothing would have happened because the weapons still wouldn't have been armed. In other words, a toggle switch saved North Carolina. But when you look at it that way, toggle switches save everything. There are toggle switches on the Space Shuttle. There are toggle switches in Fukushima. There are toggle switches on drawbridges. The system worked. Was it hairier than anybody wanted? Absolutely. Betcha they didn't do it that way again. Nonethless, here's what a Mk39 Mod 3 looks like after falling out of a plane: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Goldsboro... Look - up until 1976, the "nuclear launch codes" were twelve zeroes. We averted disaster through sheer force of will. So many terrible, terrible things could have happened that would have ended civilization in an eyeblinkc... but they didn't. And on that scale, bombs falling out of a B-52 and not blowing up is pretty low on my oh-shit meter.
Your description reminds me of the fail safes in a nuclear power plant as explained to me by a friend that used to be a nuclear engineer. Basically, "oops!" is something that people dealing with radioactive materials work very, very, very hard at preventing and avoiding.
The important difference is that nuclear power plants have to work pretty much continuously, and they have to do it in such a way that not only do they produce useful, repeatable energy, they do so without causing harm to the hundreds of people who tend them. Bombs need to work once and very effectively NOT WORK the rest of the time. That said, Chernobyl was pushed pretty far outside its comfort zone. 3mile island was contained. And Fukushima wasn't designed to deal with the cataclysm it encountered. Nothing is. Food for thought.
Haha! I know super misleading headline. I added 1961.