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Yikes, that’s alotta dead people when a nuke isn’t working as designed and unexpectedly detonates US ICBM silo map https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-45b10
by xref 4y ago
Yikes, that’s alotta dead people when a nuke isn’t working as designed and unexpectedly detonates
US ICBM silo map
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-45b10c7543ed5219a778587ef9c62c4e-c https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-45b10c7543ed5219a77858...
- geysersam 4y agoDon't misrepresent what the comment said. > okay with nuclear weapons not working when someone wants them to Obviously s/he hoped the weapons not to explode when fired.
- adrianN 4y agoSince it's not trivial to start a chain reaction that lasts long enough to create a sizeable explosion, unexpected (nuclear) explosions are a very unlikely failure mode for nuclear weapons.
- xref 4y agoAgreed, though the comment wasn’t about the _likelyhood_ of a failure
- mlyle 4y agoEveryone understands you are misrepresenting the GP comment. I hope it's on accident.
- mlyle 4y agoAnd now you've made an abusive edit; your original comment here was mocking and pointing out that it was the GP "wishing" for a failure. GP wished for a (moderately) likely failure: failure to detonate. GP obviously didn't wish for unlikely failures, like spontaneous detonation, ICBMs all flying to Washington DC, etc.
- ncmncm 4y agoWe all wish that were true. Experience has shown that it is not.
- fallingknife 4y agoConsidering that there have been 0 accidental nuclear detonations, no it doesn't.
- ghostly_s 4y agoThe US military has accidentally dropped dozens of nukes out of planes (this was on the front page a few days ago) and none of them accidentally went boom. They don't spontaneously ignite, they are designed with several levels of safeguards to prevent that.
- xref 4y ago
- jacquesm 4y agoYou've misrepresented their point three times now, that's enough don't you think. See 'the principle of charity' embedded in the guidelines as "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zeristor 4y agoYou’d think that wouldn’t you. There is the case of the Goldsboro B52 in 1961 crash in which three bombs could fell out of a plane and could have gone off but didn’t : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash Edit: of the four bombs one was only very close to going off, and a lot of lessons were learnt from this event 60 years ago.
- jacquesm 4y agoIt's a small miracle that none of them ever went off by accident and it got perilously close to that more than once. We just got very lucky.