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An Unanswered Question at the Heart of America's Nuclear Arsenal
- theseadroid 7y agoOn an unrelated note, I highly recommend this episode about nuclear weapons from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of-worlds/ https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-...
- HenryKissinger 7y agoIt's inevitable that if the US is to keep a nuclear arsenal, thousands of new nuclear weapons will have to be manufactured... ... and tested? The U.S. government could announce to the world a temporary resumption of atmospheric nuclear tests, in violation of several binding treaties, in the name of practical necessity. Such a step would not be taken lightly. A series of tests could be conducted over a few months to test new bomb designs, as well as the older Minutemen and B61s. Those tests could take place at the old Nevada Test Site and in the Pacific.
- galangalalgol 7y agoWhy atmospheric? Just cost? Ground test or sending it out to L1 seem reasonable.
- HenryKissinger 7y agoIn a real context, nuclear weapons will be detonated above ground, and you can't test heat damage and overpressure as a function of distance from the blast, with underground tests.
- flyingfences 7y agoWe already have sufficient models for how these warheads will perform if they work. The question at hand is whether they work - an underground test would give a measure of yield.
- effie 7y agoWhat is L1?
- galangalalgol 7y agoA lagrange point in space. On further thought l1 isnt stable. 3 and 4 are closer which isn't great but trash there would stay there.
- DraftDodger67 7y agoWe probably just don't need as many nukes - the world will be much less populated with near-peer adversaries in 2040. For example in 20 years time there will be as many Russian military-age males as in 1969, and as many Chinese as in 1973, and the populations will be declining continuously.
- leetcrew 7y agosure, but they will have just as much land to distribute their launch sites across. part of why the US has so many missiles is to have a decent chance of hitting all enemy launch sites
- LandR 7y agoCan we not simulate these weapons, instead of actually blowing them up? The physics seems to be pretty well understood, is this just impossible with current tech? Doesn't the US government have access to some pretty amazing supercomputers?
- dboreham 7y agoI think anyone who has any engineering experience would suspect that never testing something will eventually result in it not functioning.
- sumanthvepa 7y agoPlease, please DO NOT test a nuclear weapon. The world will be far better off if everyones nuclear weapon turned out to be a dud.
- DennisP 7y agoTrue, but if just one side's nuclear weapons are actually duds, and the other side figures that out, that's not such a great situation.
- sumanthvepa 7y agoI know. I know. But imagine the comedy of epic proportions that would ensue if WW3 consisted of all sides desperately pushing the big red button and nothing happens!
- tw04 7y agoYes, that would be hilarious. Instead of half of the worlds population being wiped out by nukes, we'd be wiped out by chemical weapons, airstrikes, and ground warfare.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoAlternative scenario: The imbeciles are lynched in the street by angry crowds, many enquiries follow, life continues as normal. I know anyone alive today, not suffering from a mental illness, that would accept their leaders starting a global nuclear war.
- tw04 7y ago
- baybal2 7y agoRussia and China remelt their pits every few years. That's more or less a public knowledge. I'm surprised that US doesn't do the same
- Nasrudith 7y agoThe blame slinging seems a bit unwarranted given the understandable constraints on detonation tests. The two plauisble outcomes even as a laymen are either the plutonium's decay results in less energetic nuclear explosions as lost to atomic decay or the breakdown products "poison" it to a dud which cannot sustain fission. The other unlikely result is a "meltdown state". The decay chains would presumably be calculable without any destruction. The composition could potentially be destructively tested by centrifuges and chromatography suitable for weapons grade radioactives - possibly resulting in just some low level possibly atomic waste instead of a detonation.
- baybal2 7y agoThat has more to do with metallurgy than with nuclear physics. It's clear that decay and fission products need at least 100 years to accumulate in any significant amount to affect munition performance. Pure plutonium has 6 metallurgical phases, and alloys used in pits add even more to metallurgic issues. Imagine an implosion design going through a brittle failure instead of an orderly compaction of a hollow pit? Or worse, one side of a pit went through phase transition, and the other don't and you don't even get a fizzle.
- coder1001 7y agoCan these things be tested in space? Instead of doing a test on earth, push something way out to space and test it, what would the impact be on earth if it was far away?
- jasonjayr 7y agoProbably yes, and probably safely once in space, but the difficulty is that it has to travel from the ground through the atmosphere to get to space, and sometimes rockets fail on the way up, creating a bigger problem when they fall back down.
- martin_a 7y agoThis is also the solution for nuclear waste: Just send it on a direct course to the sun and the problem will solve itself. But getting it reliably on that route is the (still) problematic thing.
- wrkronmiller 7y agoThe effect would be a massive EMP damaging infrastructure over hundreds or thousands of miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
- drtillberg 7y agoAs a child I thought it would have been completely hilarious if the leaders of the free world solemnly decided to destroy it by a large scale nuclear exchange, only to find much to their surprise that none of the warheads functioned due to age and lack of testing. I say leave the missiles and warheads exactly the way they are and let anyone with the temerity to order a first strike deal cognitively with the risk that the world might survive their decision.
- nirav72 7y agoI think that might be the established thought behind most of the world's nuclear arsenal. No one knows if they might all work. But the fact that some countries have them will give their adversaries second thought. See North Korea as an example. They tested one crude device few years ago. But no one outside of the NK regime know for sure if their nukes are deployable with a delivery system. But it doesn't matter. The fact that they have the capability makes even the U S pause and consider if regime change is a viable option there.
- baybal2 7y agoThat's a special case. The most likely case for somebody other than a great power making a nuclear arsenal, and ever thinking of nuclear first strike will be somebody: 1. Living in a very bad neighbourhood 2. Being extremely secretive 3. Not having reputation for bluffing, considering winning a war a matter of existential national importance If we are to see military use of nukes happening this century, most likely you will see it where you never saw it coming, in a scenario of extreme power imbalance. Saying this again, for anybody who is desperate enough to bet on a nuke for a military advantage, is already in such a dire straight, that they are already pass the point of using atomic weapons as a deterrent. They will hold it as the top military secret till the "day X"
- JumpCrisscross 7y agoA world with broadly-held would have civil wars fought with them.
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoWhen pits degrade, what is happening? Is it merely a function of the radioactive isotopes decaying below the point at which they'll detonate in a big ol' fireball?
- opwieurposiu 7y agoPu is an unusual metal. It has at least 6 different solid allotropes (phases), each of which have different density, hardness etc. The phase can change over time, kind of like how an old chocolate bar can become white and crumbly or soft and chewy. You build your bomb expecting your Pu to be in the δ phase (delta phase). If your pit has changed into a different phase due to age, the explosive lenses will not compress it correctly and you will get a dud or reduced yield. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_plutonium
- svara 7y agoI have this naive fantasy where every country that has nuclear weapons independently and secretly came to the conclusion that keeping them operational is ultimately more dangerous than not (due to accidents, human error, clinically insane leadership, ...), and just removed the detonators and unplugged the big red buttons. The nuclear deterrent remains, but is now actually based on a collective fiction. We've discovered the ultimate defensive weapon, one that only needs to exist in our imaginations ;)
- streb-lo 7y agoThe major problem with 'global zero' initiatives is that if one nation can achieve nuclear primacy they become the de-facto owners of the world. No one wants to risk that. Alternatively, the problem with not pursuing global zero is that the probability that someone will eventually use them approaches 100% in long enough timescales.