with the number of nuclear weapons in the world now, and how old a lot are, how is it possible we’ve never accidentally set one off?

Question

Title says it. Really curious how we’ve escaped this kind of occurrence anywhere in the world, for the last ~70 years.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

They’re so complex to design, build and activate that it’s incredibly difficult to get one to go off at all.

They can’t go off by accident and you have to have created it essentially perfectly for it to work at all.