Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
rapidcityjournal.com
rapidcityjournal.com
We've been reckless and by all accounts it is a miracle we haven't had a serious accident (there have been a few, just not on our own soil). The number of close calls is just astounding.
Further the book, at one point, talks about America's position on Russia and the attempts to keep them from getting "the bomb". It is exactly what has played out and will continue to play out with North Korea and Iran. History is repeating itself and we sure haven't learned from it.
Lately I have been feeling very anxious about the North Korea situation, but for some reason reading about nuclear accidents, close-calls, stories, etc. calms me in a morbid way.
I guess it has to do with "facing your fears" or something like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
There's an illusion of the utility of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons might be OK if you want to destroy masses of conventional armies or destroy the ability of an enemy fighting a heavily industrialized conventional form of war. Unless the destructive power of nukes fit into your overall strategy, it's better not to have them or waste the resources developing them (along with the risk of sanctions, etc.)
The speculation I've heard (on radio, so I cannot paste a link) is that NK analysis is roughly: NK's regime is safe as long as China sees it as useful (probably using NK as some sort of buffer state against US), but sooner or later that support will end. Then only nuclear weapons will ensure NK's regime survival. It's rational, though again just speculation.
The contradiction, or maybe unintended side effect, is that the developing of nuclear weapons itself is causing China to rethink its support of NK regime...
Kim's goals are:
1. Survival of the Kim leadership 2. Reunification of Korea
To achieve the latter (and also the prior), he needs to remove the US from intervening in any conflict on the Korean peninsula. If he had a credible threat to any major US city, then the US would have to weight the freedom of S. Korea vs. the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
At this point we have to assume North Korea will soon have dozens of nuclear weapons (basically as many as they can manage to make), and in a few years that they'll have dozens capable of being placed on an ICBM that can hit most US cities. Their progress has accelerated dramatically, that will probably make such numbers very feasible.
Now, following the premise of keeping the US out of it by way of the risk that the US will lose several or more of its major cities. Here's the problem. If the US loses a dozen of its major cities, we'll destroy China in retaliation for making the North Korea situation possible to begin with. There's no scenario where the US just absorbs that kind of vast destruction, trades nukes with North Korea and says: oh well, woe is me. China will lose hundreds of millions of its people - Beijing, Shanghai, etc - if the US sees its biggest cities nuked. The American public will demand all enablers of North Korea be held accountable, it'll lead to the classic global nuclear war scenario, a billion people die.
If the US loses one city, that'll be an extreme tragedy that the US can absorb, while obliterating NK in response.
If the US loses its top dozen (or more) cities in a nuclear exchange with North Korea, there's no scenario under which the American public won't demand retribution against the enabling power/s that made that outcome possible. China would be guaranteed to get nuked as a consequence, given its responsibility for propping up and nurturing the Kim dynasty. If the US loses half of its civilization, it will respond exactly as one might expect.
You can't actually think the American public is going to sit on its collective hands and suffer its outcome quietly? That they'd be ok with trading NY, LA, SF, Seattle, Houston, Washington DC, et al. for Pyongyang and call it a day, while China goes on about its business, its civilization unscathed, like its actions over five decades didn't make the North Korean threat what it was. If it weren't for China, the US would have destroyed the Kim dynasty during the Korean War and unified Korea. They're responsible in every possible way for what North Korea is today, they propped them up and supported each regime with full understanding of what was going on in regards to the North's nuclear program across decades. Even if I don't agree with that premise, of holding China accountable in such a way, you can bet a just-been-nuked-40-times American public will, they'll ask a simple question: who has been North Korea's primary supporting ally?
Also, I’ve seen MASH. The US’s pointless war was as responsible for North Korea as anything else.
Anyway, I really doubt there will ever be significant popular demand for nuclear war.
Edit: Thanks for the downvote, Stranger. Here's a citation. http://www.history.com/topics/korean-war
MASH the film or MASH the TV series? Both are comedies, and both are loosely based on “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors”, which is a memoir.
Adventured
But when you stop and think about it, MAD kept the world safe for 60+ years.
It's a bit paradoxical that the most powerful bomb and the doctorine named after the word "insanity" achieved (relative) world peace.
"Peacemaker" ICBM and "Peace is Our Profession" from Dr Strangelove comes to mind.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2n916d
It never makes sense to use nuclear weapons. My favourite thing about the nuclear chain of command is how many humans are involved.
The US/UN enforces then pushed the North Korean forces back north and to the brink of destruction. Then Chinese (and to a much lesser degree Soviet) forces intervened on behalf of North Korea and pushed US/UN forces back beginning a sort of see-saw that ended up with neither coalition able to make meaningful progress. After some time of a back and forth, an armistice was signed.
I think it's somewhat unclear how the balance of powers changed in the time after this.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-risk-of-nu...
The answer you are referring to is explicitly mentioned.
prevent the US from intervening/preventing him from putting down internal rebellions. the risk of nuclear escalation gives you a much greater license to do things that fly in the face of international conventions.
This is hardly a secret and a retaliatory strike from Libya would have been justified. And ultimately that's what nukes provide. North Korea is not deterring a US invasion by threatening to nuke our invading soldiers. They're deterring an invasion by implicitly threatening to nuke South Korea. If the US invaded North Korea and it ended up costing millons of lives and billions/trillions of damage in South Korea, the responsibility for that change would lay with the US as they threw the first punch. On the other hand, if North Korea engaged in any substantial preemptive attack themselves - then any loss of life could be argued as saving even more lives; similar to how we ended WW2 by nuking hundreds of thousands of otherwise innocent civilians.
[1] - https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09TRIPOLI677_a.html
Is it really though? Even if Ukraine had nukes, would it have threatened and actually have the will to use it over the lost of the Crimea? The conflict was low intensity warfare, which nukes are not particularly well suited for. I don't think nukes are the be-all-end-all weapons people think they are. There are huge consequences to using them, especially against another nuclear power.
Firstly "was" is not the right word, the war is ongoing: http://tass.com/world/965974
Secondly, imo the nature of the conflict is less important than whether a concentrated population of the adversary's citizens are within range of the weapon as far as determining the effectiveness of nuclear deterrent.
> Even if Ukraine had nukes, would it have threatened and actually have the will to use it over the lost of the Crimea?
Would those that made the decision to invade have accepted the risk of even the most minute possibility? No leader has done that so far.
Presumably, they realise the consequences of dropping a nuclear bomb in a region of the world with a couple billion people or three.
Over a conventional invasion by a neighboring nation-state with massive conventional superiority with a paper-thin cover story?
Probably. I mean, that’s why the USSR didn't pull that stunt against any of the NATO countries bordering its satellites, ever, even though they did similar things to other neighbors. And those bordering states were merely allies of the nuclear powers, not nuclear powers themselves.
Honestly, use of nuclear weapons just sounds like pure madness, no matter what the threat one is under. I mean, unless we're talking about an alien invasion (and I'm not impartial to keeping around a few nukes just in case that ever happens).
The Argentine invasion of the Falklands might be considered an exception to that.
Even the 1954 transfer was only 'administrative'. By all accounts, Ukraine should not have kept Crimea in 1991.
Crimea is 70% ethnically Russian and the majority wanted to become part of Russia. Russia invaded and held a vote. Ukraine's response to that was that the vote should not have happened not because it was undemocratic, but because it was unconstitutional.
Their story was pretty solid.
It's another story WRT to Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine's military units had poor morale and were repeatedly destroyed by regular Russian soldiers AKA "volunteers". The time frame is not days as in Crimea. Perhaps the threat of nukes would have stopped Russian tanks and soldiers from "volunteering" in Ukraine.
It is now up to the armchair historians and alt-history writers to contemplate the what-ifs.
However, some are arguing that this view is incorrect - there's a paper linked on the wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Ukraine#De...
Yeah, but the US got the Ukrainian gold.
We've never had a serious accident. So maybe it's not luck, maybe there are a lot of controls that actually work well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
3 of the 4 arming mechanisms activated. I would say it's a combination of good luck and good controls :)
For example, the locks in place at each Titan II facility all had exactly the same code (1111). And they were left unlocked.
Regarding the accidents, here are a few examples:
Thule Airbase crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
Damascus incident? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...
How about the two hydrogen bombs that were accidentally dropped from a B-52: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bo...
Or what is probably the worst incident to date, the B-52 that caught fire and almost blew up with 75,000 people within the blast radius: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-08-13/news/910328029...
The list goes on and on. That is the reason why the book specifically called out that it was a miracle we haven't had any (known) detonations.
Here is a list of the _known_ broken arrow events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear...
Keep in mind that the article we're discussing is about a 53 year old event that was _just_ revealed. There are more of them -- we just don't know about it, yet.
As an example, an implosion type bomb needs to be detonated at several places around the bomb simultaneously. It's designed such that if you don't have detonation of the explosives all at the exact same time then the pit won't make a nuclear blast.
They're very safe in terms of accidental nuclear detonation, but still, if the explosives are detonated it's going to make quite a mess to say the least.
Is it actually similar, though?
The US got the bomb in 1945.
The Russians got theirs in 1949.
Given the size of the Soviet Union, how far it is from the United States, the available spying and reconnaissance technology (no satellites, no stealth aircraft), and that the US was only four years out of World War II, I don't think there is any way the US could have made a creditable threat to use military force to stop the Russians.
Also, China and Russia were still on good terms back then. China might not have stayed out of it if the US attacked their ally and neighbor.
Compare to North Korea and Iran. In both cases the US can make a creditable military threat. From a purely military point of view, the US could easily wipe either (or both) of them out.
Furthermore, neither has any powerful allies who want them to get nukes.
With North Korea, their only powerful ally is China and I don't think China actually cares if North Korea gets destroyed as long as (1) it doesn't send a lot of refugees across the Chinese border, and (2) whatever replaces it continues to function as a buffer zone between them and South Korea because they do not want a US ally right on their border.
The US is more than capable of launching a preemptive strike against NK without Seoul being hit nearly as hard as one would think.
The main reason they won’t isn’t the shelling of Seoul is that China won’t allow US troops on its border and neither the US, SK nor China wants to deal with the fallout of having to care for millions of uneducated by modern standards starving people that believe in unicorns.
The flood of refugees into SK would do much more damage than any possible shelling from NK which is also why neither player has pushed for critically destabilizing measures or a regime change for the past 50 years.
You don't think China has such a system and won't give a friendly call to North Korea? You'd be willing to bet the lives of South Koreans on that?
Also, as much as we like to think of North Korea as a joke nation, I'm sure there are some very smart people in the government. In fact, there may be more smarter people in government than in the United States. There are plenty of opportunities in the private sector here for a smart ambitious person. There's less private sector opportunity in North Korea, and statistically, 25 million people is bound to produce quite a few very smart people. As long as they can identify and capitalize on some of them, you can bet they are likely government resources.
So, I think it's much more likely that North Korea doesn't have early warning system technology because they've decided they don't need it, and they can focus their research elsewhere. If China gives it to you for free (for the reasons you outlined), then why waste those resources? I would be hesitant to assume any perceived shortcoming of North Korea's situation wasn't specifically sought by them. Not because they are geniuses and masters of strategy that have designed every aspect of their situation, but at least some aspect are, and complacency and underestimating your enemy have no place in war, much less a nuclear war.
You seem to not understand exactly what the situation is even if NK would get an early warning say 10min it would not even get it past the guy who answers the first phone get alone to the military in the field.
The US and Russia have invested 70 years in building infrastructure which is designed for a single contingency which is to launch a retaliatory strike within 15-20 minutes this requires an enormous investment and North Korea barely has phone lines.
This doesn’t even take into account the fact that the soldiers manning the artilary installations can barely hit anything and that they don’t have enough shells to fire their 11,000 cannons zeroed on Seoul.
North Korea’s conventional military is a joke these days and unless China puts its own soldiers into the fray it won’t be even a two sided fight.
You seriously think high level Chinese diplomats don't have very quick communication access to Kim Jong-un? Why would you think that? I think it's very likely they have phone access to multiple aids of which one is guaranteed to be very close.
> The US and Russia have invested 70 years in building infrastructure which is designed for a single contingency which is to launch a retaliatory strike within 15-20 minutes this requires an enormous investment and North Korea barely has phone lines.
That's because our system has checks and balances and a heirarchy. Kim Jong-un likely has direct phone access to the cammanders in the field, and through secured lines. That's the first thing you do, and that doesn't take a genius to figure out.
> This doesn’t even take into account the fact that the soldiers manning the artilary installations can barely hit anything and that they don’t have enough shells to fire their 11,000 cannons zeroed on Seoul.
They don't have to aim. Everything is likely already dialed in. There's only one target to retaliate towards no matter who attacks (since it's not going to be China). They could literally have a single qualified person go through and dial in the settings for every piece of artillery and every rocket launcher system, and just have trusted personnel to initiate the attack.
> North Korea’s conventional military is a joke these days and unless China puts its own soldiers into the fray it won’t be even a two sided fight.
It's not about being able to put up a fight, it's about making it too costly to start the fight.
In the end, even if the North Korean response comes after first strike (and a first strike likely wouldn't eliminate their offensive capability, according to retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales[1]), a lot of South Korean lives will be lost.
1: http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/04/19/north-koreas-sim...
By the time it would take China to detect a US attack, figure out what to do, deliver a message to the NK leadership and that message can be relayed to the field there won’t be many canons left.
I think you don’t realize how long does it take for orders to go through, even a close air support request can easily take 30 min or more to push through a single chain of command.
An NK doesn’t even have direct communications with most of their fielded forces.
And as far the the zeroed cannons go it really ain’t that simple, 80% of their shells missed a bloody island that was also zeroed and were not talking about missing a target on the island we’re talking about missing an island several kilometers in size.
Here's the last paragraph: North Korean anti-aircraft weapons “are not all that impressive,” Scales said, “but there’s lots of them.” Could the North Korea guns be taken down? “Sure, over time,” he said. “But by the time we do that, the damage they’d inflict on Seoul would just be staggering.” They go into the reasons for that earlier.
I was a bit incredulous when I referenced someone that k rw that they were talking about and it was ignored. I'm even more so now when I'm actually being called out for bringing some expert information to this pissing contest.
Don't hear what I'm not saying: I think you are ignorant of some of the facts, not incapable of understanding. I see now that my initial comment was overly petulant and could have been more constructively worded. I will post some links I find helpful when I get out. But should you gave the time there are some enlightening docs on documentaryheaven.com (their site is a huge mess) about Best Korea. Be well.
And none as direct ancestors to this comment. If you follow this directly up thread up you'll find I'm the only one to have sourced any reference beyond the very top level comment, which was an Amazon link to a book. Even if we expand to branches from tzs second level comment, there's almost no references.
> I recommend the New Yorker article first.
I did find what I assume is the New Yorker article you mentioned in a sub-thread that starts out talking about Qaddafi, but it just seems to bolster my point:
Six years into Kim Jong Un’s reign, some analysts in Seoul argue that senior Party officials can overrule or direct him, but U.S. intelligence believes that Kim is in sole command. ... That left Jong Un, who had received a degree in physics from Kim Il Sung University, had trained as an artillery officer, and was active in security and political work.
So an intelligent person that is well versed in the challenges and threats artillery faces? Are we to assume he ignores the obvious weaknesses that he should know of (since he's trained in their aspects) then?
The Obama Administration studied the potential costs and benefits of a preventive war intended to destroy North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Its conclusion, according to Rice, in the Times, was that it would be “lunacy,” resulting in “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualties.” ... If Kim used his stockpiles of sarin gas and biological weapons, the toll would reach the millions. U.S. and South Korean forces could eventually overwhelm the North Korean military, but, by any measure, the conflict would yield one of the worst mass killings in the modern age.
So the same source you called out as worth reading that might inform my opinion mirror what I've been stating all along. Attacking North Korea would result in massive casualties in South Korea. There is no current strategy that would result in us wiping out the offensive capability of North Korea before they can cause massive damage.
> My chief issue with your comments is, as I stated before, your general implications and assertions, particularly in regards to China and Best Korean competency.
So, my implications and assertions that a nation that views its defense a existential priority won't put the bare minimum of 1910's level technology in place to make sure they have secure land lines run to important military locations? This is a country with artillery that is literally "dug in", as in they've placed the entire thing below ground with large hanger doors that can be closed to shield the artillery for defense, and opened for attack.
NK has an estimated 12,000 pieces of tube artillery, and another 2,300 multiple launch rocket systems.[1] That we would be capable of knocking all these out, or that they don't have specific orders on exactly how to proceed should the command structure deteriorate that would result in them commencing attack requires more explanation than "we'll take out the cannons quickly" which is the argument most the responses have put forth, and as I've references previously from educated sources, that is not the case.
I'll just note that I'm still citing references, my own and ones you pointed out, which still support my argument. If you can't cite something yourself, perhaps you should examine your own beliefs, and why there's no evidence to be found for them.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/10/02/why-th...
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IIRC from a recent article regarding potential DPRK artillery salvo on Seoul the civilian casualties are in the tens of thousands.
South Korea kind of like Israel have bomb shelters everywhere. So DPRK only has a very limited number of salvos before people realize what's happening and seek cover (also counter-battery fire).
IMHO South Korea should have moved their capital a long time ago. They had 50+ years.
IIRC POTUS can order a nuclear strike by himself. No checks and balances.
The "two man rule" is basically two men check the authenticity of the order (IIRC it is encrypted Twitter-length message) and or turn the keys to "vote" launch. Each launch crew in two silos (4 people) need to vote to launch to actually launch.
There's not a lot of information on the order of succession and the two-man rule on the Internet. ;(
I'd think if everyone above is dead or unreachable the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Education can start nuclear war all by themselves too. No checks or balances either.
Lets say for some miracle you're right, and the plan works. The fallout is going somewhere - China, South Korea, Japan, and the far east of Russia. That's a lot of unhappy people right there, before the rest of the world realises just what tiny hands has done and the US truly becomes the evil empire.
You're assuming Trump won't tweet our launch orders..
People are used to being able to pick the phone and call someone that doesn’t work everywhere.
North Korea doesn't have to do any hitting. If the US nukes the North, the South will take the fallout full in the face.
People also overestimate the amount of fallout from modern nuclear weapons, it won't be a picnic site anytime soon but it's not going to turn into a Fall out game either.
Nuking the DMZ isn't going to happen unless it's to stop a flood of 200 million zombies, but nuking Pyongyang isn't going to have drastic effects on SK due to fallout or radiation worse case people would have to drink bottled water for a few weeks.
If those people include the South Koreans, you still have a problem. Some estimates I’ve heard say more Americans were killed by heart attacks caused by the increase in blood pressure caused by the fear of terrorism after 9/11 than by actual terrorism. Likewise, if just 10% of Seoul flees in fear of radiation, I’d expect many dead just from the running-away part.
A strike would not originate from North Dakota -- it would come from stealth bombers right on top of their artillery forces and command and control infrastructure, as well as from nearby boomers (ctf134) launching at a pace of a dozen warheads per minute, per boat, throwing mk-4/5's with recently upgraded fuzing systems.
When the LEP is complete, they will be GPS guided and accurate enough to destroy hardened targets from kinetic energy alone.
If the DPRK threat continues to escalate, and the US were concerned enough, F-35's could be upgraded with B61-12 harnesses, adding a nuclear stealth armada with pinpoint-accurate weapons to the arsenal. US fbm's are also not equipped to close to capacity due to arms control agreements. During initial flight testing, maneuvers consistent with deployment of 14 warheads were observed, meaning an fbm could deploy 336 warheads.
...from North Korea
If we start launching nukes in the direction of NK, how does China know it's going to stop in NK and not hit them? Do we call them up first? Then what do they say?
Is it totally out of the question that China would panic (or reason?) and counterattack? NK doesn't exist in a vacuum, and in fact NK wouldn't exist at all today had China not intervened in the last war.
NK is an ongoing humanitarian disaster right now. At the moment, everybody is standing by blaming the NK regime for not acting to resolve it. If you remove the regime, the crisis gets much worse. If you bomb the country, the crisis gets much, much worse.
When you are done bombing the snot out of NK, who will pick up the pieces? Who will be on the hook for millions of starving people? Who will be the neighbor that gets slammed by the masses of humanity in desperation?
You think China hasn't thought about all this? You think they won't automatically recognize the obvious and enormous threat to themselves? Every missile that lands in NK is a direct threat to China.
Basically if there's an ICBM flying over China and it looks like it's going to hit NK, there's no way to kill all of that horizontal velocity and significantly change its trajectory.
Also, China has a defense treaty with NK and has very publicly stated that it will honor its treaty unless NK strikes first.
Personally, I don't think nuking North Korea would even be an effective use of resources. With modern military precision bombing I'd say it's serious overkill unless you want to destroy something like an entire carrier strike group or deliberately cause loss of civilian life.
If North Korea can kill tens of thousands of people in Seoul in a few minutes with just artillery and no one wants to be responsible for that... then why do they feel the need for nukes?
That's unless your scientists have found a way to control nuclear fallout so that it stays within national borders.
So...Russia?
And South Koreans: Seoul is just 60km (35 miles) from the border, about as far as Palo Alto from SF. Even if the nukes don't affect South Korea, the DPRK has the border lined with arms (conventional, but effective enough).
That whole 'massive military presence in western europe and asia minor' thing notwithstanding of couse..
We brought some of them home. The US still had a quarter of a million troops in Germany in the late 1980s. In the 1950s, there were still 300,000 to 400,000 across all of Europe (eg 50,000 in the UK in the mid to late 1950s).
It was: the US, the UK, France, Western Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, Turkey. Russia also very likely would have lost several of its western post WW2 Soviet Union territories in the chaos.
The US could bomb Russia from all over Europe. Russia couldn't sustain a meaningful bombing campaign against the US mainland. Russia also had a mediocre navy compared to the US. Rapid attrition would have guaranteed a Russian loss.
Russia was very weak for 30 years after WW2 (really their entire existence except for the brief oil boom of 1974-84). While the US was in the exact opposite position. Timely US reinforcement probably would not have been necessary. That's a war that would have gone on either for years, or for a few weeks. Russia also would have had few allies in a European war. The US had the manpower, financial and manufacturing ability to stay in a long-term fight with Russia, whereas Russia could not have afforded to stay in it. They could have never replaced their war manufacturing after the US destroyed it with aerial bombing, and the war would have ended there (in the non-nuclear scenario). Russia would pull out the nuclear card, an equivalent of suing for peace, and that would have been that.
Major bridges and railway lines in Germany were designed with ways to block or destroy them to deny then to the enemy. Even the smaller roads near the border had holes in them for explosive charges (sometimes allegedly even pre-placed to save time). I grew up at the Czech border and have seen these. All of this was done to slow any invasion force that might enter the country from the east. After the fall of the iron curtain all of this was removed.
Also, Germany until 1990 was hardly in a political position to deny its western Allies the stationing of more troops if they had really wanted. Formally, provisions from the WW2 surrender were still in place that would have allowed the disbanding of the West German government and placement under allied control (this finally ended with the 2 plus 4 treaties).
Thankfully, the defense plan never needed to be tested, so there is no telling if it would have worked.
If you look back at contemporaneous accounts of the world wars, it all looked pretty manageable and locally contained at the time.
The UK and US thought about attacking the USSR, right after the WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
I worked around nuclear weapon systems and TBH came away with the opposite impression. I grew up terrified of the military and panic mongering about of "THE BOMBS!" from family, media, etc. But after this, I ironically came away feeling much safer seeing how professional and serious people took their jobs.
At one point one of the regulators in the Safety Commission stopped receiving reports about accidents because the Air Force knew that this would be used as ammunition to fix the Titan II safety issues that had been in place for decades.
It's probably not intended that way, but the above is a bit of a strawman. There are many serious reasons to be concerned.
For example, a few years ago it was discovered that the Air Force units operating the missiles had very low morale, there was widespread cheating on qualification exams, significant disregard for safety regulations, and a problem with drug use. Also, the general in charge had a drinking problem so bad that he went on a binge in Moscow.
Before that, it was discovered that the Air Force lost track of several nuclear weapons. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Bob Gates, fired multiple Air Force leaders.
Outside the missile field, maybe 10 years ago peaceful civilian protestors penetrated a complex storing highly enriched uranium or plutonium (weapons-grade materials, IIRC), and spent something like 20 minutes adjacent to the building containing the materials before security discovered them.
IMHO, with something this dangerous, the greatest threat is complacence and trust. We are dealing with human beings who we are requiring to be vigilant over a period of generations - something people are very poor at for even a short time. Trust, but verify said Reagan of the Soviet Union, and that applies to our side too.
There were none:
"there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. However, no discernible increase in the rate of cancer deaths is expected."[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
No, the problem is that we assume that we wouldn’t put clowns in charge of something this dangerous. So when we put clowns in charge of nuclear weapons and they inevitably fuck up (and not just a bit), we either refuse to believe it is even possible or we assume it is a rare accident.
Or maybe it's evidence for the many-worlds-interpretation of quantum mechanics... we're in one of the few universes where we didn't blow ourselves up.
See Wikipedia's list of nuclear accidents.[1] This wasn't one of the big ones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
> Incredible as it may sound to a civilian, Hicks said he spent no time worrying about the thermonuclear warhead. He had been convinced by his training that it was nearly impossible to detonate a warhead accidentally. Among other things, he said, the warhead had to receive codes from the launch-control officers, had to reach a certain altitude, and had to detect a certain amount of acceleration and G-force. There were so many safeguards built in, Hicks later joked, that a warhead might have been lucky to detonate even when it was supposed to.
The fuel used for a nuclear weapon is also basically radiologically inert by necessity so if it does explode conventionally there is not a significant release of radiation. It's pretty toxic chemically, but there's not a lot of it so it's not nearly as bad the fallout that would precipitate from a nuclear explosion.
https://books.google.com/books?id=lJ6JDQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA41&ots=...
Regular detonators have a primary explosive which is triggered by a modest electric pulse. The primary explosive detonates and its energy detonates the secondary explosive. Those can go off by accident, cook off, etc.
The ones used in nuclear weapons are just inert wires. Without a hulking big electrical pulse (about a megawatt for a microsecond, which is one joule) they can't do anything. A big capacitor bank is required to fire such things. It's done this way because all the detonators have to go off within nanoseconds of each other to get the symmetrical implosion squeeze to work. Otherwise the thing just blows itself apart without a nuclear reaction. That's happened a few times in plane crashes.
Newer (post-1950s) nuclear weapons don't even have a full critical mass in them. The core is squeezed down by the implosion to achieve criticality at a density higher than the normal density of the material. Without a symmetrical implosion, not much happens.
This physics makes for a much safer device. It's why nobody has ever had one go off by accident.
(The Hiroshima bomb, though, was very unsafe. It was a gun bomb, basically a 5-inch gun with conventional detonators and propelling charge. The crew of the Enola Gay was told that if they had to return to base without having dropped the bomb, drop it in deep water. Don't try to land with it. A crash or fire on landing probably would have detonated the device. That design was only used once.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding-bridgewire_detonator
To clarify: There was absolutely no chance at any point of a nuclear explosion. The article suggests that some big explosion was on the edge of possibility which, given the context, one might think would be a nuclear explosion. The warhead, the "physics package", was never really a worry. Getting those to detonate requires some careful triggering.
This was also a SOLID fuel rocket. While you wouldn't want to damage it, it wasn't full of the nasty pressurized liquids of other missiles. Getting its fuel to actually ignite would require more than hitting it with a hammer. You need something akin to a blasting cap. Shuttle used something more like a giant flamethrower. The solid retro rockets were not directly triggered by a the short circuit. I'd bet good money that their ignition system felt the short rather than the fuel being ignited by the short.
While the physics package surely has numerous safeties, I'd be concerned that the safeties would be damaged in a way that no one could really predict after falling 80 feet. They served their purpose well, but you can bet all the engineers were in the lab for the next 72 hours straight looking for various failure modes.
I'd say that deep within the archives is a report detailing exactly this scenario. Drop testing of munitions is standard stuff.
See https://www.rtc.army.mil/Resources/Capability%20Sheets/Insen...
> risking nuclear contamination.
not a nuclear explosion. A conventional boom could spread radioactive materials all over.
There are no radioactive materials in the warhead. In other words: there are no materials that undergo radioactive decay. What is in there are fissile materials: ie. materials that emit neutrons upon being irradiated with neutrons.
The only way the warhead might become radioactive is if it partially detonated.
Exactly. Even if the conventional primer went off it's not gonna cause a create the conditions necessary for fission because it wasn't set off by the detonator.
Anyway you still have a mess on your hand if the explosives detonate but there's no chain reaction.
Oh cool, I was wondering why they didn't just defuel the rocket first thing.
A weapon detonating by accident is terrible. Thousands of weapons on hair-trigger alert is civilization-ending. It's absolutely insane that we're conditioned to believe that this is not only normal - but the best possible state of affairs.
That is to say, we're in the arms race because each country did have N each. But then one country had N+1, and so the others raced for N+2, and so on. If we hoped for 50 each, wouldn't it drop back to the same pattern, and someone would become 50+1?
Note that 4,000 of course doesn't solve the N+1 issue, but my point is if you're going to aim for 50 - I'm not sure what problems it solves. May as well shoot for 0, no? 0 seems equally impossible to me as 50, but at least it solves a single problem.. nukes, in general.
The OP's solution seemed to be making everyone have 50 instead of 4,000. That seemed both impossible, and a weird goal. If you're going to try for the impossible, shouldn't we aim for 0?
I don't ever see us stopping N+1 nukes though.
I absolutely would not. Those 2 countries know far more about the process then those other countries, and they have the budget to do it right. You would have to duplicate labs, and computers, and other efforts 20 times in your scenario, and each of those labs will not be as good as the 2 higher funded ones.
> A weapon detonating by accident is terrible. Thousands of weapons on hair-trigger alert is civilization-ending.
Look at it from a fear point of view: No one will detonate a thousand weapons unless they are declaring total war. So all one needs to do is read global moods and see if total war is likely (it's not). (i.e. war might happen, but not total war)
An accident on the other hand can happen randomly, you would be permanently and constantly worried about one.
Or if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that the other nuclear power has declared total war. There's been a number of false alarms that have been successfully ignored, but what if one of those false alarms came during the Cuban missile crisis or immediately after the invasion of Afghanistan?
US dropped depth charges on a USSR submarine and the latter thought WWIII had begun. Three people had to agree to use nuclear weapons and two did.
If your goal is maintaining an arsenal of world-ending weapons cheaply, sure. I am not trying to optimize for that use case.
> No one will detonate a thousand weapons unless they are declaring total war.
Or they think that the other side declared total war. Or they are engaged in a small-scale conventional war, and are afraid the other side will escalate. Or they are escalating, by using tactical weapons, and the other side retaliates with strategical weapons. (Spoilers: Russia has made it very clear that it will use tactical nuclear weapons, against military targets, in an otherwise conventional conflict.) Or there's an intelligence failure, and they believe that they are the target of a sneak attack.
All of these are incredibly plausible ways for a nuclear war to start.
In this vein, Politico noted six years ago:
>I talked with the president at one of those fundraisers some months back, and I asked him, "What keeps you up at night?" > And he said, "Everything. Everything that gets to my desk is a critical mass. If it gets to my desk, then no one else could have handled it." So I said, "So what's the one that keeps you up at night?" > He goes, "There are quite a few." > So I go, "What's the one? Period." > And he says, "Pakistan." > I get that: There's the question of whether Zardari's government is actually in control, or whether the military is. And how close the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or whoever else is to having their hands on real weapons of mass destruction. It's the closest government there is to allowing those weapons to either be used or sold to places that we really wouldn't like to have those weapons. That's a concern for all of us.
One bad actor ruins the game.
Now instead of two political leaders to worry about, you have 20. Not sure if that's what you really want.
But all that aside, 20 countries each having 50 warheads seems a lot likelier to end up with 20 countries each having thousands of warheads than 2 countries having thousands of warheads and everyone else none does, no?
A nuclear bomb serves no other purpose than killing huge numbers of civilians in a short period of time. Shouldn't we strive for a world where nobody has that capability? Not to mention that in the United States, one man has unilateral and final authority to launch a nuclear first strike.
Edit: countries -> governments
If all countries claim to destroy their nuclear bombs and never ever make a new one, would you trust all of them?
Why is a handful of countries having nuclear bombs the best way to ensure that? Why not two dozen countries having nuclear bombs? Neither Ukraine nor Iraq would have been invaded if they were nuclear-armed.
It's incredibly self-serving of nuclear powers to claim that they can have these weapons, because they will be responsible with them, but nobody else can. (And then they go ahead and start wars.)
It'd be definitely interesting to see Ukraine and Iraq conflicts unfold while they had nuclear weapons. I'd be all for giving nuclear weapons to every single country if that'd stop wars in the future. But I'm afraid some asshats would start blackmailing others and those would bend over. And we'd be back at square 1.
The reality is that if a superpower wanted to launch a sneak nuclear attack on another superpower, it could be done to great effect without missiles or bombers, and without necessarily giving away the identity of the aggressor.
The fact that it hasn't been done either suggests lack of imagination or lack of willingness - or perhaps both.
As for small countries - it's debatable if nukes would have saved Iraq or the Ukraine, because any small country using nukes on a superpower is likely to do more damage to itself than the superpower.
But this is largely a sideshow in 2017. As we're currently discovering, infowar and weaponised social media are a much cheaper and more efficient way to wage proxy war than nukes or terrorism are.
Nukes are almost obsolete now that it's so ridiculously easy to persuade a country to destroy its own political stability and self-confidence with covert funding of fringe extremism, supported by weaponised social media.
And if that's not enough to do the job, direct hacking of infrastructure remains an option.
The West is well behind the curve on defending against both. As and when the next war starts - if it hasn't already - the reliance on nukes as a deterrent is going to become one of those "And this is what they were doing on until the new reality hit" chapters in future history books.
Until it isn't. But then it's too late to try anything different.
> If all [governments] claim to destroy their nuclear bombs and never ever make a new one, would you trust all of them?
I don't trust statements from governments, as a general rule.
We had that for a brief period of time. US was the only one with the nuclear bomb. Would they have used it on Japan if they had a chance to retaliate?
> I don't trust statements from governments, as a general rule.
I guess we agree governmental disarmament agreements wouldn't work..
Of course. Japan's army was bent on total annihilation. If Japan had a chance to retaliate, they would have struck first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
artifical lakes, mining, terraforming, diverting asteroids, propulsion for extremely large spaceships, fighting intergalactic invaders etc.
> Its difficult enough for a super power to safely store and control its WMD.
There has never been an accidental detonation of a nuclear device. The problem this article describes was one in rocketry, insulation, and adherence to protocols.
Nuclear non-proliferation is important, but this article is not the reason why. The reason non-proliferation is important is because of the ramifications of using the devices, not challenges in storing them.
It is easy to become prone to a sort of survivorship bias. But nuclear proliferation guarantees that we will have more and more opportunities to test that safety. It only needs to fail once to be catastrophic at which point your argument would seem a little flawed.
Is there some company out there making non-conductive screwdrivers designed for electrical work? I can understand that maybe the materials science to make strong plastic screwdrivers didn't exist in the 1950s, but surely they exist today, right?
I've seen other fun specialized types of screwdrivers in my career:
Screwdrivers with conductive plastic in the handle, to deal with ESD requirements in the spacecraft industry. Alternatively, take a normal plastic screwdriver handle and wrap it in copper tape.
Beryllium screwdrivers (non-ferrous) for use around MRI machine bores thanks to the insane magnetic fields. You also have to wear ceramic hard-toed shoes.
I'd guess anyone working on an MRI machine is wearing gloves anyway for other reasons.
Also, it's used in dental alloys. It seems it's only toxic if you inhale its dust.
Fun fact: Your body has no way to remove it from your body, so you accumulate it forever.
For example, it is used in spacecraft to save weight over aluminum. When I worked with MRI machines, we used FETs with beryllium oxide ceramic (BeO) backing. BeO is an amazing thermal conductor, electrical insulator (only diamond is better).
Unfortunately tons of people were exposed before the risks were at all understood and the health effects can be pretty bad.
It's fine to machine as long as you're making actual chips (how do you think they make all those tools for the oil industry).
Yeah, CNC + coolant is how you'd do it if you're making the tool.
If you're making a custom tool from a broken tool you have lying around then you use the Bridgeport and Intern method.
[1] https://www.jensentools.com/gc-waldom-9356-fuse-puller-molde... [2] https://www.etsystudio.com/listing/552201603/antique-wooden-...
https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...
Best line of the story. I'm curious how close we've been to nuclear annihilation and we had no idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...
The underground control center was amazing though.
Furthermore, I fear regional conflicts involving mass scale conventional face-off (ex. dmz) are converting to a low operating cost high risk situations in the form of mutually assured destruction.
East Asia is venturing into a potential double whammy of naval and nuclear arms race--smaller countries like South Korea are entering a phase of normalization for nuclear armament with pressure mounting from the public to have a deterrence and a back up plan yet cannot have land based missile silo's, instead relying on nuclear submarines that will host the IRBMs. The cost is much higher than the "previous generation", as smaller countries will most certainly be decimated, land based silos do not make sense.
"The two 3–4-megaton MK. 39 nuclear bombs separated from the gyrating aircraft as it broke up between 1,000 and 2,000 feet (300 and 610 m)."
For reference, Little Boy's (Hiroshima) yield was 15 kilotons.
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=4000&lat=35.5111142&l...
You can find a timeline of these almost accidents here: https://futureoflife.org/background/nuclear-close-calls-a-ti...
It's certainly time to reduce the number of warheads from a nuclear-winter-guaranteeing one to an at least nuclear-deterrence-still-works-but-an-accident-is-terrible-but-no-longer-civilization-ending one.
There was an incident (this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...) when a serviceman dropped a spanner while working on a missile. There was a fuel leak and an explosion, thankfully the warhead was thrown clear of the silo by the blast.
Likely these things happen more often than is publicly known, yet we've not (yet) seen a full-on swiss cheese kind of accident.
2) the radioactive material is spread out over a large area, contaminating
neither are as benign as an ordinary explosive of any yield, and I'd rather not risk any of that, at all.
#2 is sort of half true. You wouldn't get nuclear material over a large area because it's so heavy. You could get a big plume from Chernobyl, but that was because there was a nuclear reaction going on, and it wasn't uranium that got boosted into the sky by the fire.
Still an expensive mess, but a pretty localized mess.