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There have been many accidents, of a kind where even one is one too many. Given the potential damage, I certainly don't feel comfortable with your assessment th
by retSava 9y ago
There have been many accidents, of a kind where even one is one too many. Given the potential damage, I certainly don't feel comfortable with your assessment that there wasn't any danger it would go off.
Likely these things happen more often than is publicly known, yet we've not (yet) seen a full-on swiss cheese kind of accident.
- gozur88 9y agoNuclear bombs aren't like normal bombs. You can burn them or blow them up with conventional explosives and they won't go off.
- retSava 9y agoYes, but there are two risks to that: 1) the conventional explosive detonates and it's similar enough to "normal" operating procedures to create critical mass and the nuke detonates 2) the radioactive material is spread out over a large area, contaminating neither are as benign as an ordinary explosive of any yield, and I'd rather not risk any of that, at all.
- gozur88 9y agoIt's hard to imagine your #1 could happen. The compression wave in a nuke has to be just right to achieve critical mass. It's not an easy thing to pull off deliberately under the best of circumstances #2 is sort of half true. You wouldn't get nuclear material over a large area because it's so heavy. You could get a big plume from Chernobyl, but that was because there was a nuclear reaction going on, and it wasn't uranium that got boosted into the sky by the fire. Still an expensive mess, but a pretty localized mess.