I don't think anywhere in the book he ever argues that a traditional
implosion device has any chance of going off from being on fire for example
but then there are the 'linear implosion' devices that use only two
simultaneous detonators and as he mentions in the book if not designed for
'one point safety' they can possibly generate a very low nuclear yield with
a single detonator going off and you can imagine that happening in an
accident like a plane crash.
Another point he made was that weapons of the time were armed by a simple
electrical pulse signal, an electrical pulse that could conceivably be
generated unintentionally during a mid-air aircraft break-up for example. I
can't remember the exact details but he cites an accident in which a pair
of bombs were dropped accidentally (I think when a B52 broke up mid-air),
they happened to have their lanyards yanked out and as they fell they went
through all of the sequences of events typically preceding detonation like
thermal battery activation, X-unit charging etc. The only thing that
stopped them detonating with full yield was that during the break-up they
didn't get an erroneous pulse of voltage in the right place to arm them. In
other cases weapons were taken off aircraft after an airborne alert and it
was noticed that they were armed despite the arm/safe switch in the cockpit
being set to safe. If the same accident had occurred in this case then the
weapons would have detonated as designed.
My main takeaway from the book was just how uncontrollable and pointless a
full nuclear exchange between superpowers would be, not being an adult
during the cold war it's hard to believe that people ever thought that they
could 'win' a large scale nuclear exchange, especially given that we now
know Russia had a dead-hand system they would enable if war was imminent
that would have guaranteed a retaliation even in the case of a successful
leadership decapitation.
Andrew
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 6:58 AM, David Weinshenker <daze39@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
From: James Padfield <james.padfield@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Jan 17, 2017 8:51 AM
To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AR] Re: Damascus AR Incident
Perhaps getting a little off-topic here....
I am not so sure I agree. I used to teach a (Masters-level) course on
nuclear weapons (in particular focusing on the explosives and the
explosive train). The assignment I used to set the students was to
research and present on a nuclear weapon accident. Naturally the
Titan II accident at Titusville, along with several others,
particularly the B52 crashes at Thule in Greenland and at Palomares in
Spain, came up regularly. One of the things that I took away from it
every year was that actually it was really difficult to get a nuclear
weapon to detonate unintentionally.
Yeah, it seems like the real risks (at least with the implosion design)
are more related to things like industrial accidents, rocket vehicle
incidents, hazards of handling explosive and radioactive materials, etc.,
rather than an unexpected activation of a fission explosion itself.
(The original "linear gun" design - the "Mark 1"/"Little Boy"
configuration -
was another matter: there was a reason the propellant wasn't loaded into
the
"gun" mechanism until the carrier aircraft was safely airborne!)
-dave w
