Wasn’t the linear type (Mark 1) abandoned very soon after the Hiroshima
explosion for safety reasons?
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Andrew Burns
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2017 1:33 PM
To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AR] Re: Damascus AR Incident
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
<mailto:daze39@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > wrote:
From: James Padfield <james.padfield@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:james.padfield@xxxxxxxxx> >
Sent: Jan 17, 2017 8:51 AM
To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto: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.