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xref

Yikes, that’s alotta dead people when a nuke isn’t working as designed and unexpectedly detonates

US ICBM silo map https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-45b10c7543ed5219a77858...

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Don't misrepresent what the comment said.

> okay with nuclear weapons not working when someone wants them to

Obviously s/he hoped the weapons not to explode when fired.

Since it's not trivial to start a chain reaction that lasts long enough to create a sizeable explosion, unexpected (nuclear) explosions are a very unlikely failure mode for nuclear weapons.

Agreed, though the comment wasn’t about the _likelyhood_ of a failure

Everyone understands you are misrepresenting the GP comment. I hope it's on accident.

And now you've made an abusive edit; your original comment here was mocking and pointing out that it was the GP "wishing" for a failure.

GP wished for a (moderately) likely failure: failure to detonate. GP obviously didn't wish for unlikely failures, like spontaneous detonation, ICBMs all flying to Washington DC, etc.

We all wish that were true. Experience has shown that it is not.

Considering that there have been 0 accidental nuclear detonations, no it doesn't.

You wish that is what that meant. But the more you learn about the topic, the less confident you will be.

Pure luck.

The US military has accidentally dropped dozens of nukes out of planes (this was on the front page a few days ago) and none of them accidentally went boom. They don't spontaneously ignite, they are designed with several levels of safeguards to prevent that.

You’d think that wouldn’t you.

There is the case of the Goldsboro B52 in 1961 crash in which three bombs could fell out of a plane and could have gone off but didn’t :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

Edit: of the four bombs one was only very close to going off, and a lot of lessons were learnt from this event 60 years ago.

It's a small miracle that none of them ever went off by accident and it got perilously close to that more than once. We just got very lucky.

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