Live data from Hacker News

Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

rapidcityjournal.com

191–200 of 250 posts

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#191
post #54

I recently finished Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety [0]. I can't recommend the book enough for how eye opening it really is into how blasé we have been with nuclear weapons. We've been reckless and by all accounts it is a miracle we haven't had a serious accident (there have been a few, just not on our own soil). The number of close calls is just astounding. Fur…

This actually makes a great search tag: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=B00C5R7F8G&type=comment

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Now it will be a lesson for others: nukes are way more reliable than some piece of paper, which no one is gonna follow" Is it really though? Even if Ukraine had nukes, would it have threatened and actually have the will to use it over the lost of the Crimea? The conflict was low intensity warfare, which nukes are not particularly well suited for. I don't think nukes are the be-all-end-all weapons people think they a…

Ukraine couldn't have used the threat of nukes WRT Crimea. It happened too fast (IIRC Russians used old school messengers to avoid Western SIGINT), and at least the majority of the population supported or did not actively oppose them (e.g. Ukrainian generals defecting to the Russians) It's another story WRT to Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine's military units had poor morale and were repeatedly destroyed by regular Russian s…

The utility of nuclear weapons is strategic, not tactical. The only relevant deterrent is their use against against major cities for which speed is not really relevant. What's relevant is maintaining launch capability in your control - hence major powers go for stealthy submarine platforms.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#193
post #111
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the broken arrow incidents I'm aware of this was one of the least dangerous in terms of detonation threat. > Its difficult enough for a super power to safely store and control its WMD. There has never been an accidental detonation of a nuclear device. The problem this article describes was one in rocketry, insulation, and adherence to protocols. Nuclear non-proliferation is important, but this article is not the r…

But these devices always exist as one part of a wider technical and human system. It seems unwise to separate the two when safety could be comprised by a failure in any part of the system.

Perhaps I am ignorant and don't know it, but the USSR collapsed, its nuclear arsenal was split, and nothing awful happened. Even during one of the most spectacular system-wide failures in modern history, a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons was largely kept safe and in tact.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#194
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey it's not all bad, we managed to convince Ukraine to destroy their nuclear weapons and it worked out really well for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

It worked so 'well' that it lost part of it's territory. From Budapest Memorandum Wiki: 'The memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.' Now it will be a lesson for others: nukes are way more reliable than some piece of paper, which no one is gonna follow: http://www.dw.com/en/ukraines-forgotte…

And the lesson has been rammed home multiple times by now unfortunately... Iraq, Libya, Ukraine... so it's not even ambiguous. All politicians of calibre by now understand this.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#195
post #133
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Further the book, at one point, talks about America's position on Russia and the attempts to keep them from getting "the bomb". It is exactly what has played out and will continue to play out with North Korea and Iran. History is repeating itself and we sure haven't learned from it. Is it actually similar, though? The US got the bomb in 1945. The Russians got theirs in 1949. Given the size of the Soviet Union, how…

Trouble with NK is, they don't have second strike capability, so a disarming first strike from the US is possible and NK knows that. That puts NK in a use it or lose it situation with their nuclear weapons and it may be, that the regime calculates that they (the generals) can survive one. Or they don't, they calculate that their only chance is rapid escalation and basically calling the bluff of the US, or they may ju…

yeah, the game theoretic view of this, together with the sober leadership on both sides (haha), is rather disconcerting.

If you look back at contemporaneous accounts of the world wars, it all looked pretty manageable and locally contained at the time.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#196
post #120

If you happen to visit Badlands National Park, or western South Dakota in general, make time to visit the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site mentioned in the article. I toured Delta-01 last summer, and it was fascinating. The tour guide did a fantastic job of conveying the gravity of the mission and just how scary the Cold War was.

I really wanted to visit this in 2009 while driving across the state. Unfortunately there were no signs on the highway to guide us (it was a relatively new historic site at the time) and me and my traveling companion missed it.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#197
post #87
post #66

This wasn't really that big a deal. By the Minuteman era, warheads were safe against fires and crashes. Nuclear weapons from several B-52 bombers hit the ground hard in crashes without a nuclear explosion. (Sometimes the implosion charges did go off, but not symmetrically, as is needed to get implosion.) The Minuteman missile itself had a solid fuel engine. This was nowhere near as bad as the incident described in "C…

Yep, a modern nuclear bomb takes a very coordinated sequence to actually have the confinement needed to get good utilization of the fissile fuel (i.e., be a nuclear-driven explosion), otherwise they just fly apart before any significant fission/fusion can occur. The fuel used for a nuclear weapon is also basically radiologically inert by necessity so if it does explode conventionally there is not a significant releas…

"Radiologically inert" is a bit much. Both uranium and plutonium are alpha emitters. This basically means that if you can keep the stuff outside your body, you're OK. A chunk of metal is safe; breathing dust is lethal.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#198
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China, India and Pakistan, all three of them nuclear powers, have been fighting a low-level conflict over Kashmir for several decades. So far none of them has nuked the others. Presumably, they realise the consequences of dropping a nuclear bomb in a region of the world with a couple billion people or three.

And no one has lost any territory to the other since they developed nuclear weapons. All conventional millitary conflicts date from before they became nuclear powers.

The Sino-Soviet border conflict occured after both were nuclear powers, as did the Kargil War between India and Pakistan.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#199
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one will detonate a thousand weapons unless they are declaring total war. Or if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that the other nuclear power has declared total war. There's been a number of false alarms that have been successfully ignored, but what if one of those false alarms came during the Cuban missile crisis or immediately after the invasion of Afghanistan?

> Cuban missile crisis US dropped depth charges on a USSR submarine and the latter thought WWIII had begun. Three people had to agree to use nuclear weapons and two did.

Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_B-59

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#200
post #66

This wasn't really that big a deal. By the Minuteman era, warheads were safe against fires and crashes. Nuclear weapons from several B-52 bombers hit the ground hard in crashes without a nuclear explosion. (Sometimes the implosion charges did go off, but not symmetrically, as is needed to get implosion.) The Minuteman missile itself had a solid fuel engine. This was nowhere near as bad as the incident described in "C…

Supposedly static electricity could trigger the detonator in a nuclear weapon. There was a near accidental ignition during the development of "the Gadget" and my understanding is that the ignition system was virtually unchanged for decades. https://books.google.com/books?id=lJ6JDQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA41&ots=...

Lightning bolt, maybe. Static electricity, no way. The detonators used are exploding-wire devices. They're just hugely overloaded resistors.[1]

Regular detonators have a primary explosive which is triggered by a modest electric pulse. The primary explosive detonates and its energy detonates the secondary explosive. Those can go off by accident, cook off, etc.

The ones used in nuclear weapons are just inert wires. Without a hulking big electrical pulse (about a megawatt for a microsecond, which is one joule) they can't do anything. A big capacitor bank is required to fire such things. It's done this way because all the detonators have to go off within nanoseconds of each other to get the symmetrical implosion squeeze to work. Otherwise the thing just blows itself apart without a nuclear reaction. That's happened a few times in plane crashes.

Newer (post-1950s) nuclear weapons don't even have a full critical mass in them. The core is squeezed down by the implosion to achieve criticality at a density higher than the normal density of the material. Without a symmetrical implosion, not much happens.

This physics makes for a much safer device. It's why nobody has ever had one go off by accident.

(The Hiroshima bomb, though, was very unsafe. It was a gun bomb, basically a 5-inch gun with conventional detonators and propelling charge. The crew of the Enola Gay was told that if they had to return to base without having dropped the bomb, drop it in deep water. Don't try to land with it. A crash or fire on landing probably would have detonated the device. That design was only used once.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding-bridgewire_detonator

Post reply on HN