> The U.S. Government soon announced its safe return and loudly reassured the public that, thanks to the device’s multiple safety systems, the bomb had never come close to exploding.
Okay but seriously. How good are the safety mechanisms? Is there significant risk an unarmed nuke could explode if going fast enough or with enough vibrations?
Making a nuclear weapon actually detonate in a nuclear manner is one of the hard problems of making a nuclear weapon. Basically you have to set the explosives off just right. An accidental detonation of the conventional parts of the bomb can't do that (short of like space re-entry speeds or some other thing that could provide the force needed even without an explosion). The fear has always been around the detonation systems since those are the only thing realistically capable of setting off a nuclear explosion. Since the 1950s as detonation systems have gotten more reliable they've added more and more redundancy so those have all sorts of interlocks to prevent them from going off if not armed and fired. It's not like an airbag where if you hook up 12v to the right pins it goes bang. They actually need to be armed and then fired which requires a whole bunch of systems doing their thing in a specific order. The systems that arm weapons (like the aircraft and rocket side hardware) are relatively sophisticated and robust and a hell of a lot of man hours have been put into them over the years because the last thing you need is a risk of ordinance going off when you're already trying to fight a fire.
Adding to this, I've heard on the grapevine that the parameters of the detonation sequence are generated from a hash of the arming code number. The arming code number isn't like a traditional code lock where there's a chip that's doing "strcmp(entered_code, CORRECT_CODE)", but instead the arming code number is a fundamental piece of how the bomb works. Without that you need the kind of state nuclear apparatus you'd need to build a bomb in the first place to reverse engineer (think a state run nuclear research lab), or at best you can remanufacture it into a much crappier bomb that probably duds to just being a dirty bomb.
Dunno, wikipedia says the parameters are encrypted.
Anyway it would probably be good enough to just rip all the safety/firing electronics out, and replace it with your own best effort attempt at controlling the fireset capacitors charging and firing.
What's there to vary anyway? Charge voltages, and discharge timing? Odds would be you could probably make it go boom in a more controlled manner than what happened in past accidents when the bombs exploded after hitting the ground.
The trouble would be getting past the tamper-proof barrier, because the modern bombs are probably made to self-destruct, from what I've read, so instead of a nice ready-made bomb internals waiting for a simpler arduino control circuit for a fireset, you'd be dealing with a hot mess, after trying to get in.
> Dunno, wikipedia says the parameters are encrypted.
Laymen refer to any use of crypto as "encrypted".
> Anyway it would probably be good enough to just rip all the safety/firing electronics out, and replace it with your own best effort attempt at controlling the fireset capacitors charging and firing.
It's really not though, it's very very specific to the design of the warhead, and the electronics are embedded in it in a way that you can't just take it apart and put it back together. It's all nasty stuff like FOGBANK that if you could remanufacture, you wouldn't need to steal a nuke in the first place.
> What's there to vary anyway? Charge voltages, and discharge timing? Odds would be you could probably make it go boom in a more controlled manner than what happened in past accidents when the bombs exploded after hitting the ground.
Yep, nanosecond precision detonation on the shaped charges, and not just "all at the same time", but a very specific sequence that's dependent on the exact geometries, isotopes and these days, how they've decayed over decades. That's what Oak Ridge uses those fancy super computers for.
> The trouble would be getting past the tamper-proof barrier, because the modern bombs are probably made to self-destruct, from what I've read, so instead of a nice ready-made bomb internals waiting for a simpler arduino control circuit for a fireset, you'd be dealing with a hot mess, after trying to get in.
They are very much not designed to self destruct. Really the opposite. And yes, the threat model is that without the codes, you leave someone with components that they essentially have to remanufacture into a new bomb, which takes a well funded state actor. Or they just use the bits as a dirty bomb, which is why that gets so much play in the age of terrorist cells. But you don't get a full on usable nuke by just sticking a microcontroller on a stolen bomb.
Old bombs have much simpler designs, which can be hacked. Moreover, A bomb have core and blanket. Blanket can be reused. The core can be replaced with a few kilos of plutonium and deflectors. Plutonium is easy to extract from waste of weapon grade reactor. Yeah, it's easier to remanufacture.
Yeah, I was astonished that they managed to get such a successful experiment on the first try with trinity, despite 40s technology and computers. I expected that there'd be a few failures before the first successful nuclear explosion.
Though a conventional detonation would turn it into a dirty bomb which while almost infinitely better than a full blown nuclear detonation would still ruin a good number of lives.
That is a nuclear weapon that was Wikipedia says was in service from 1957-1966. Wiki also says that the first nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945.
This means that the development of the weapon in question occurred sometime in the first 12 years after the first nuclear weapons were tested.
I think that it is safe to assume that this very old weapon design has only been approved on since the 1950s.
The nuclear weapons program is seen (in all good faith) by all those running it as vital to national security and national survival.
Anyone who expresses the slightest skepticism or concern about any aspect of it is seen as undermining this vital national goal. It should be noted that the skeptics / concerned are on very difficult ground professionally, because there are so many layers of secrecy and the barriers to disclosure are so strong that asking questions is actually nasty and rude. The people who are being questioned cannot disclose their true position or hint at why an arguement or line of questioning is silly and so they have to sit there (decent and honourable as they may be) sharply aware that they look shifty and silly. This is bloody unfair and unpleasant, it's never going to build bridges or relationships. It is an "unprofessional" line to follow.
So, these people (the skeptics) are then excluded from the program and anything that connects to it. The exclusion happens professionally (that guy is not honest or straightforward - don't trust his judgement), commercially/employment/youarefired & socially (you are a heretic, abhorrent, communist, idiot, greenie).
And that is ok - as far as it goes - I understand, I get it, there are many other roles and interests in life to pursue. But what it has created is the most profound bubble around the development, control and management of nuclear weapons within which everyone involves genuinely believes that they are safe, effective and necessary. There is no doubt. And without doubt there is complacency and ignorance. I hope to god that this doesn't lead to a major accident, but right now I am pretty sure that it will.
Hmm, the wiki says “ Former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg has claimed to have seen highly classified documents indicating that its safe/arm switch was the only one of the six arming devices on the bomb that prevented detonation.”
The linked story says “ Robert McNamara, who’d been Secretary of Defense at the time of the incident, told reporters in 1983, "The bomb’s arming mechanism had six or seven steps to go through to detonate, and it went through all but one.””
Where is your quote from? I can’t find it in the Natgeo article.
That very same wiki. The very next sentence after Daniel Ellsberg quote: "In 2013, information released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed that a single switch out of four (not six) prevented detonation."
Sandia National Labs spends huge amounts of time, energy, and money making sure US nuclear weapons turn into bricks if they are damaged or tampered with, while also being ultra-reliable if the President orders their use.
It's a level of safety and reliability engineering that exists nowhere else; you simply cannot comprehend it unless you've worked there.
It wasn't always this way but it's been true since the 1970s. The accident described in the article was one of several that created Sandia's engineering culture.
If you somehow got your hands on a modern nuclear weapon and you had a team of PhD engineers, a year of time, and the best tools in the world, you might be able to get the radioactive material out, but you absolutely would not make it explode.
That last sounds wildly implausible. Are you saying they booby trap it to set off the high explosive if someone tampers with it (making it a booby trapped dirty bomb)? Because otherwise there's really nothing stopping some dude with an angle grinder from getting the 'radioactive material' out in a day or two.
Generally this sounds nice, but I don't really believe it without some evidence of actually motivated red teams testing the system.
When I said "you absolutely would not make it explode" I meant a nuclear explosion; I thought that was clear but perhaps not. I said you might be able to extract the radioactive materials by using brute force. You might also be able to extract the high explosives, but so what? There are far easier ways to obtain high explosive materials. The fact that you could conceivably extract the radioactive materials is why the weapons are very well guarded. The point is that if you somehow stole a weapon, you wouldn't be able to use it as designed.
The engineering process for these things is highly adversarial. Layers and layers of red teams trying to break them in the conceptual phase, the design phase, the build phase, and the deployment phase. Plus coding extremely detailed computer models of the weapons and their usage scenarios and trying to make things fail in simulation. On the fastest supercomputers in the world.
> If you somehow got your hands on a modern nuclear weapon and you had a team of PhD engineers, a year of time, and the best tools in the world, you might be able to get the radioactive material out, but you absolutely would not make it explode.
I'm saying that there's no "might" about extracting the radioactive materials. Nor do you need "a team of PhD engineers, a year of time, and the best tools in the world". An angle grinder and a couple days should suffice.
As for making it explode, that may indeed be very difficult, but I am not highly confident given the military's general attitude and track record. Hopefully my cynicism is unfounded, but supercomputer simulations primarily designed to ensure that aging weapons still function doesn't really help with security.
The US military does not design US nuclear weapons or their safety systems. Of course military requirements are factored in, but design responsibilities and final authority for use are in civilian hands, by law. That's why the Department of Energy is a separate entity from the Department of Defense.
Obviously the military could make mistakes when the weapons are in their custody, but civilian designs make sure those mistakes don't cause an unplanned detonation. Nor can a rogue military unit arbitrarily decide to start WW III. If they tried, the weapons would turn into bricks.
Most warheads are actually very safe, and require either a detonator, or very high heat/pressure to set them off. The most dangerous part of most weapons is actually the propellant (which free-fall bombs obviously do not contain).
This is a product of what weapons are designed for; the warhead is designed to resist premature detonation, but the fuel (and oxidizer if present) must be readily and easily combustible in an engine.
If I understand correctly, atomic weapons have a "strong link" and a "weak link". The detonation won't happen without everything firing correctly and on time; the signal to do that has to pass through both the strong link and the weak link. The strong link isn't in place until the bomb is armed. But couldn't a violent-enough accident knock the strong link into place? Yes, but that same amount of violence would destroy the weak link. (That's the point of the weak link.) So even if an atomic bomb had an accident hard enough (and lucky enough) to arm it, it still couldn't explode, because the weak link would be broken.
a relatable analog is a piece of firewood. there is enough combustible energy in a section of dead tree to kill or maim you and set off a chain reaction that will destroy everything in your house, but you neednt worry if you have wooden furnitire, even if theres a lighter on it.
Okay but seriously. How good are the safety mechanisms? Is there significant risk an unarmed nuke could explode if going fast enough or with enough vibrations?