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While true that they are fairly precise instruments, they were not always built with insensitive explosives and other physical failsafes against accidental deto
by gnu8 10y ago
While true that they are fairly precise instruments, they were not always built with insensitive explosives and other physical failsafes against accidental detonation. I believe some models could produce a significant amount of fission just from some of the explosive lenses detonating on impact with the ground.
- Tuna-Fish 10y agoThat kind of accidents are only possible for gun-type bombs. For an implosion-type bomb to initiate, the explosives really do need to all go off simultaneously, detonation from one side just causes the core to be sprayed out through the other side. Implosion bombs are designed to have the least possible amount of fissiles for weight/economics reasons, which means that even a sub-millisecond delay in the detonation of one of the slow explosives causes the core to completely fail to initiate.
- evo 10y agoNot necessarily true, as the effort to miniaturize the package size for use in ICBM warheads proceeded, they've successively reduced from the "soccerball" style of lenses in the trinity device down to only a handful (it is a design mandate that a bomb retains "one-point" safety in the event that it is detonated by an external source at a single point, but referencing Command and Control here, there have been flawed bomb designs that had a 15% chance of a 40kt yield in an accidental one-point detonation).