Title says it. Really curious how we’ve escaped this kind of occurrence anywhere in the world, for the last ~70 years.
In: Engineering
Due to the half-lives of the bomb cores, they’re actually less likely to “accidentally” go off as they age.
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.
Nuclear bombs are incredibly difficult to set off. The principle is easy: take a bunch of fissionable material and squeeze it really hard. Actually getting this done in practice though is quite an engineering problem. Modern devices use a shell of shaped conventional explosives that all have to be set off at exactly the same time. The only way this is possible is with precise timing mechanisms. And electrical surge or unexpected event isn’t going to trigger the explosives with the necessary precision to set off the fission reaction. It would just be a conventional explosion that scatters the fission material around the blast area.
Almost all nuclear weapons ever built are plutonium implosion weapons.
You take a ball of plutonium and squash it in a very specific way and it goes bang.
You do anything else with that plutonium and not much happens.
The device to squash it is called an ‘explosive lens’. It’s a set of explosives around the plutonium that have to go off in exactly the right way to squash it. Any other form of explosion and nothing happens. So even accidentally making those explosives go off won’t cause the nuclear explosion.
There is a type of nuclear bomb that could be accidentally detonated – a ‘gun type’ uranium bomb. In this type of bomb a cylinder of uranium is fired into a hollow tube. This does not need complex explosives, and so a simple accident could make it go bang. This is one of the reasons only a very small number of these were built, and they are all now decommissioned.
If you want to read some super scary stuff about nuclear weapons in the 50s I recommend Command and Control.
That actually is a *big concern*.
The simple answer would be “maintenance”–if you drain the propellant, inspect the weapon for faults, do preventative maintenance on it, replace components (or the whole weapon system) and monitor it for stability, it stays safe.
Let it sit for decades, without *any of that*, and you get a potentially dangerous situation.
James May tried but it just wouldn’t light.
They are so destructive that there’s a whole protocol and safeguards against an accidental firing. They aren’t, as far as I’m aware, sat in active mode.
There were some accidents with critical masses in the early days. Look up demon core.
Latest Answers