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The irony here is that nuclear weapons are actually safer to have lying around than conventional weapons; The amount of work that it takes to actually arm and a
by indrora 2y ago
The irony here is that nuclear weapons are actually safer to have lying around than conventional weapons; The amount of work that it takes to actually arm and activate a warhead is higher and you get basically one chance to get it right or it locks you out and self-defeats.
For anyone who is curious, there's a wonderful short video on PALs and how they isolate a nuclear warhead from the outside world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LPmAF2eNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LPmAF2eNA
- fluoridation 2y agoEveryone knows about PALs. You have to warm them up in the steel mill and then cool them down in the freezer room.
- talldayo 2y agoHowever, that does not stop adversaries with physical access from dismantling the warhead and extracting the enriched fissile material. In a practical sense, easily obtained nuclear weapons are probably more dangerous than TNT UXO, or at least possess the potential to be used for greater harm.
- babypuncher 2y agoNukes are also not very stable long-term Their fissile payload is radioactive after all, and as it decays it becomes harder and harder to achieve prompt criticality.
- fluoridation 2y agoThey're more stable in the sense that it takes active effort to move them to the exploded state, while chemical explosives need active efforts to keep them unexploded.
- babypuncher 2y agoI was using "stable" in the "shelf stable" sense rather than the "chemically stable" sense. I can see how that is ambiguous in this context.
- jordanb 2y agoNukes are full of conventional explosives, plus the radioactive pit. A failed nuclear detonation is still a dirty bomb.
- lsllc 2y agoRight it's not like the PAL unlock codes were just "00000000" or anything: http://web.archive.org/web/20040404013440/http:/www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm http://web.archive.org/web/20040404013440/http:/www.cdi.org/...