3 ms·

> the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt I would say its fair, would you feel safe if all bombs only had

by wnevets 13y ago

> the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt I would say its fair, would you feel safe if all bombs only had this switch from the 50s?

stevetursi 13y ago
So he means something like what a surge protector blocks? I suppose they could have neglected to put a fuse in the circuit which should have protected it against a surge that would damage some very expensive equipment (not to mention cause nuclear detonation.) But I don't know. I wasn't there to see and I didn't read the report. And we all know fuses fail as well - would that be the fourth out of five failsafes? To answer your question, no - I honestly would not feel safe. But "dramatically close" is different altogether. When I think "dramatically close" I think about the time my kid ran into the street and I grabbed him from in front of a car... I needed to act urgently to avoid disaster. I could be wrong though (and often am.)
- wnevets 13y ago
  According to the wiki it disintegrated on impact, I'm sure that played a role in the "dramatically close" statement
smsm42 13y ago
That's like comparing losing a lottery by guessing only 3 numbers out of 4 and playing a lottery where you need to guess only one number. These are statistically very different events, since you don't guess other 3 numbers correctly every time - and all fail-safes aren't failing at the same time. That's the point of having many of them - if each of them fails one-in-a-million time, you get 10^24 of security.
- nostromo 13y ago
  Here we have a sample of 8 safety measures across two bombs with 3 failures. That's not 1 in a million, that's 1 in 3.
  - corin_ 13y ago
    That's not how probability works, though. I could go and buy a lottery ticket tomorrow for the first time in my life and win the jackpot, it wouldn't mean that the odds of winning are 100%.
    - nostromo 13y ago
      No, this isn't a problem of probability, it's a problem of "not enough data." Based on this tiny sample, here's the lottery analogy: The lottery will flip 4 coins that have a 37.5% chance of being heads. If you roll 4 heads lots of people die. So, just using this very inadequate sample from a single declassified document, you could estimate that a misfired bomb has a 2% chance of detonation (37.5%^4). Obviously none of us know the real dataset, but my point is simply that it's not comforting that so many safety measures failed. (Which, as it happens, is also the opinion of the author of the original report in the article.)
      - corin_ 13y ago
        > No, this isn't a problem of probability, it's a problem of "not enough data." That was exactly my point, that with such little data you cannot judge the probability.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    Actually, according to the article, only one bomb suffered failure of 3 security measures out of 4. The second one just dropped to the ground and disintegrated on impact[1], as any well-behaved non-activated bomb should. Of course, this still leaves uranium and other stuff laying around, but that's another matter - no security system can prevent that, if you have it in the bomb and it falls down, it'll be where it fell. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

by wnevets 13y ago

> the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt I would say its fair, would you feel safe if all bombs only had this switch from the 50s?

stevetursi 13y ago

So he means something like what a surge protector blocks? I suppose they could have neglected to put a fuse in the circuit which should have protected it against a surge that would damage some very expensive equipment (not to mention cause nuclear detonation.) But I don't know. I wasn't there to see and I didn't read the report. And we all know fuses fail as well - would that be the fourth out of five failsafes? To answer your question, no - I honestly would not feel safe. But "dramatically close" is different altogether. When I think "dramatically close" I think about the time my kid ran into the street and I grabbed him from in front of a car... I needed to act urgently to avoid disaster. I could be wrong though (and often am.)

wnevets 13y ago
According to the wiki it disintegrated on impact, I'm sure that played a role in the "dramatically close" statement

smsm42 13y ago

That's like comparing losing a lottery by guessing only 3 numbers out of 4 and playing a lottery where you need to guess only one number. These are statistically very different events, since you don't guess other 3 numbers correctly every time - and all fail-safes aren't failing at the same time. That's the point of having many of them - if each of them fails one-in-a-million time, you get 10^24 of security.

nostromo 13y ago
Here we have a sample of 8 safety measures across two bombs with 3 failures. That's not 1 in a million, that's 1 in 3.
- corin_ 13y ago
  That's not how probability works, though. I could go and buy a lottery ticket tomorrow for the first time in my life and win the jackpot, it wouldn't mean that the odds of winning are 100%.
  - nostromo 13y ago
    No, this isn't a problem of probability, it's a problem of "not enough data." Based on this tiny sample, here's the lottery analogy: The lottery will flip 4 coins that have a 37.5% chance of being heads. If you roll 4 heads lots of people die. So, just using this very inadequate sample from a single declassified document, you could estimate that a misfired bomb has a 2% chance of detonation (37.5%^4). Obviously none of us know the real dataset, but my point is simply that it's not comforting that so many safety measures failed. (Which, as it happens, is also the opinion of the author of the original report in the article.)
    - corin_ 13y ago
      > No, this isn't a problem of probability, it's a problem of "not enough data." That was exactly my point, that with such little data you cannot judge the probability.
- smsm42 13y ago
  Actually, according to the article, only one bomb suffered failure of 3 security measures out of 4. The second one just dropped to the ground and disintegrated on impact[1], as any well-behaved non-activated bomb should. Of course, this still leaves uranium and other stuff laying around, but that's another matter - no security system can prevent that, if you have it in the bomb and it falls down, it'll be where it fell. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash