[AR] Re: Damascus AR Incident
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2017 15:27:00 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 16 Jan 2017, Pierce Nichols wrote:
... My biggest takeaway from the book is that nuclear weapons typically
pose a much more serious practical threat to the nations that build and
possess them than they do to anyone else. The fact that no nuclear
weapons have ever detonated by accident or through misuse is an
incredible run of luck, because it sure as hell wasn't by design...
Actually, it was by design -- the wartime bombs (especially Little Boy)
were rather iffy, but after the war, people worked very hard to make
accidental detonation impossible. Ensuring that a bomb could crash at
supersonic speed, or cook in a burning aircraft, without doing more than
splattering radioactive debris around the immediate neighborhood, quickly
became a major constraint on bomb design.
Henry
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