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

Nuclear weapons are, by design, nearly impossible to set off accidentally. You need a very specific sequence of events to happen in exactly the right order at exactly the right times, which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen without deliberate human intervention.