There are a lot more trucks than there are nuclear warheads. If there were as many warheads, and they went as many miles as trucks, I expect that accidental detonations would be a lot more common.
> Firstly, has there ever been an accidental detonation of a live nuclear warhead? A lot more common than zero is still fairly infrequent.
No, but there have been plenty of accidents with live nuclear warheads (including losing them in the ocean!). The fact one hasn't gone off is more a matter of there not being a ton of them in the first place.
Nuclear weapons can't detonate from being physically damaged. They might explode and scatter their contents about from the explosives in the core, but they won't reach criticality in anything other then an intentional, triggered detonation.
A weapon can be triggered without it being intentional, see the goldsboro incident. The bomb went through three of four arming sequences as the plane carrying it broke apart, it's considered luck the fourth and a subsequent detonation did not occur.
Also what you are describing is "One Point Safety" in which an external explosion or fire can cause a nuclear detonation. This is mostly true for the current US arsenal, but wasn't in the past. It's one of the main reasons why the Little Boy design was so poor for safety, it only required one (preferably intentional) explosion
That hasn't been historically true. It might be true for newer ones but older designs could have gone off. There's also incidents where the bomb was armed accidentally, say, by it slipping while in a plane. Some of the "intentional" detonators were very simple and could be triggered by a surge.
Not only that, but designs thought to be "one-point safe" (a detonation starting at one point in the explosive lens will not cause a significant nuclear chain reaction) actually turned out to cause significant nuclear yield if detonated from one point. Same source.
Everything in the current US inventory has that property. The US didn't achieve that until 1960 or so, after extensive nuclear testing. It's not clear about the weapons of other nations.
The Hiroshima enriched uranium bomb was about as safe as an IED. It would have gone off if it hit the ground hard or was in a fire. The bomber crew had orders to dump the bomb in deep water if they had to abort the mission and return to base. Landing on Tinian with the bomb was considered far too risky.
Accidental detonation can include, "Sir, we have indications of multiple Russian launches!"... followed by ~15-45 minutes to decide it it's a glitch, or the end of the fucking world.
It has happened before, but fortunately without the detonation.
> There doesn't appear to be a consistent theory as to why we aren't all dead from nukes.
Probably because launching a nuclear attack doesn't benefit nation states, if other nation states also have nuclear weapons. Also, all large high GDP nation states currently have intertwined economic dependencies, which also makes it less likely they would be inclined to launch nukes at each other.
Obviously, at the moment, North Korea stands out as a potential exception here, but they have nowhere near the number of warheads or industrial capacity to even play on the MAD doctrine level - they're certainly far from becoming anything like the next USSR.
So the only really remaining scenarios that could lead to a nuclear attack (barring massive changes in the current geopolitical order) would be that some non-nation-state actor, perhaps with fanatical motivations, gains access to a nuclear weapon. Although, in this case, without the state infrastructure to actually launch multiple warheads at the same time, it's unlikely that such an attack would be in any sense civilization-ending (even though it would certainly be very devastating, of course).
> There doesn't appear to be a consistent theory as to why we aren't all dead from nukes.
We haven't had a nuclear war...
> Your claiming there aren't enough of them to be dangerous, while elsewhere in the thread someone is trying to scare us with a very large number.
I'm not claiming that at all, I'm just saying that just because one hasn't been accidentally detonated doesn't mean a whole lot. The biggest danger is surely an intentional detonation, but accidents do happen.
What it does tell us is this: at the height of the nuclear arms race the USA and USSR collectively had in excess of 70,000 nuclear warheads.[1]
71 years have passed since the first nuclear bombs were used. That's 71 years without an accidental detonation nor a nuclear weapon used in an act of aggression on enemy soil.
Nuclear weapons exist and we aren't doing too bad of a job coping with that.
But, I suppose, as Steven Pinker is fond of saying: no one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.[2]
A man falls off the roof of a ten-story building. As he's passing a third-story window, the occupants within can hear him shout: "So far, so good!"
Given the many. many known nuclear close calls (And I'm just counting the ones that were likely to cause a nuclear war - not domestic mishandling of materials), this is an insane position to take, with our current nuclear arsenals.
Four times in our nuclear history, the decision of one man saved us from armageddon. We are only having this conversation because people like Stanislav Petrov made the right decision - after the entire command-and-control system surrounding them failed.
What do you suppose is the risk per year of nuclear war? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? One in a million?
Going 71 years without it is compatible with all of those numbers, yet they mean very different things for our ability to prevent nukes from being used, and for our likely future.
I personally don't find it particularly comforting that we've made it this far. Just because we've made it 71 years doesn't mean we'll make it another 71.
I'd take your bet, but only because I believe an intentional detonation is far more likely.
My vaguely informed guess is that the probability of nuclear war is around 1% per year. This is roughly consistent with what we saw during the Cold War (both the lack of a nuclear war and the numerous instances in which it almost happened) and seems to be consistent with the way things are set up today.
I suggest you read about the cleanup of polonium around london after the alexander litvinenko incident. That is only for enough radioactive material to poision one person. Scale this up to a nuclear weapon and I imagine it would be a nightmare
