> The impact of the crash put it in the "armed" setting. Fortunately -- once again -- it damaged another part of the bomb needed to initiate an explosion.
It's easy to be snarky about nuclear weapons almost going off time and time again from the 50's to the 70's and maybe later, but when you look more closely it's actually an incredibly difficult design challenge.
A nuclear bomb has two design criteria that are at odds with each other; On the one hand it must under no circumstances detonate when it isn't suppposed to. On the other hand it must be easy to detonate when it's supposed to.
How do you design a fail-safe system that lives up to those two criteria?
Well a lot of that starts with not flying them across your own country fully armed.
Nukes are incredible hard to set off, you could blow one up with a missile. It would be a mess but that is not enough to set off the full on detonation of the core material.
The scary thing isn't a nuke going off accidentally, I mean if you keep enough of them it's just a certainty on a timeline. The scary thing is a miscommunication about whose it was, and the vengeful actions that follow.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] threadStuff like this makes me wonder about quantum immortality. Maybe we just inhabit one of the slices of the multiverse where we didn't die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g&list=UU3XTzVzaHQ...
http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2bxfzq/john_oliv...
It's pretty frakked up.
Edit: Oh, and the cold war is heating up: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2c1emy/russia_may...
None of this is settling.
And it was posted here a few weeks ago as well.
Here's a couple:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910
> The impact of the crash put it in the "armed" setting. Fortunately -- once again -- it damaged another part of the bomb needed to initiate an explosion.
That's a lot close than "whoops, we dropped one".
A nuclear bomb has two design criteria that are at odds with each other; On the one hand it must under no circumstances detonate when it isn't suppposed to. On the other hand it must be easy to detonate when it's supposed to.
How do you design a fail-safe system that lives up to those two criteria?
It's a lot harder than it sounds.
Nukes are incredible hard to set off, you could blow one up with a missile. It would be a mess but that is not enough to set off the full on detonation of the core material.
The scary thing isn't a nuke going off accidentally, I mean if you keep enough of them it's just a certainty on a timeline. The scary thing is a miscommunication about whose it was, and the vengeful actions that follow.