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

Because we set off over 2000 of them deliberately in semi-safe locations to make them safe.

A very large portion of the nuclear tests that occurred during the cold war were so called “safety tests”. They conducted often dozens of tests for individual warhead types to see what would happen if they caught on fire, if one detonator went off, if it crashed into the ground at high speed etc. They would not enter service until they had passed these tests.

Many of the earliest nuclear bombs who did not undergo this sort of safety testing were so unsafe they had to be stored in a disassembled state, only to be put together when they were intended to be used.