US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located

If a nation state has a nuke, it's in their interest to hold it as deterrent. As soon as it's used, anyone seeking accountability knows whom to visit. Eg Pakistan, Israel, NK have all been holding for years with motive to use them, but haven't.

If a terrorist group has a nuke, it's in their interest to use it asap. If they delay, it might be taken away from them. If they use it, they achieve the attention and blood they seek, while the world doesn't know where they all live (assuming good opsec) and where they might have more. This might indicate they don't have any.

There was something of a heroic, very secret effort to get the place more or less secured and reduce its proliferation risk.

https://thebulletin.org/2013/08/into-thin-air-the-story-of-p...

> Some of these tests—particularly tests involving plutonium—did not vaporize the material in a nuclear blast. It remained in tunnels and containers, in forms that could be recovered and recycled into a bomb. In addition, the Soviet Union discarded equipment that included high-purity plutonium that would have provided materials and information that could lead to a relatively sophisticated nuclear device if it had been found.

> When scientists and military personnel withdrew from Kazakhstan following the collapse of the Soviet Union, they abandoned tunnels and bore holes filled with plutonium residue—enough plutonium, if fully reclaimed, for terrorists or a state to construct dozens of nuclear bombs. Between 1991 and 2012, scavengers looking for valuable metal and equipment from the former Soviet test site came within yards of the unguarded fissile material; in two cases the scavengers broke into the vessels used to contain some of the experiments, although there is no evidence that they removed any plutonium.

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-...

The radioactive material could be used for dirty bombs, but if there's societal collapse, I don't think such a tactic would have much of a useful place for anyone.

Think about that the next time you get on a plane.

> As it fell, one bomb deployed its parachute: a bad sign, as it meant the bomb was acting as if it had been deployed deliberately. It started flying through the seven-step sequence that would end in detonation. The last step involved a simple safety switch. When a military crew found the bomb, it was nose-down in the dirt, with its parachute caught in the tree, still whole. As the Orange County Register writes, that last switch was still turned to SAFE.

Perhaps you are saying the same thing arriving from different paths. OP didn't say why it was amazing they didn't detonate. Maybe they read the same article. Are you assuming that they think nukes just go boom in an explosion?

It is amazing they didn't detonate, given how far along in the arming sequence they seam to have been. It is not hard to conceive of something bumping that switch during the destruction of the plane ... world might be a very different place had that happened. US thought it was nuked (by the Soviets), launches attack, Soviets launch counter attack.

Without the force you get various intensities of fizzle explosions and radiation bursts.

Hitting the ground with a "doink" after falling out of a plane is more likely to break something than trigger a full-scale explosion.

When it comes to the original fission weapons, you’d use a spherical arrangement of high explosives to force a carefully crafted, solid core to implode and achieve the critical mass (fat man) or you’d fire a gun with fissionable material as the bullet into a fissionable target that would achieve critical mass once the bullet whacked into it (little boy). Your description is super interesting because it sounds like maybe you were conflating the two. I can’t imagine the gun method really takes a lot of energy (more than a shotgun shell, but not much more?) but the high explosive arrangement for the spherical method was probably a scary, powerful work of art, in its way.

I expect with the more developed weapons, not to mention the hydrogen bombs, the warheads are quite sturdy and it’s the arming systems and fuses that prevent disaster. The bombs might sometimes be expected to hit the earth from a great height and then detonate, after all.

This isn't really how it works because you are not "putting energy" into the system via explosives.. You are compressing a plutonium core to cause it to become "supercritical".

To your point, this is very difficult because if the explosive lenses are not perfectly timed, the core will not compress properly. This could cause anything from a total "fizzle" where the plutonium is spread over a large area due to "conventional explosives" to a yield far below expectations.

To get the "powerful chain reaction" you need to hold this compressed "supercritical" core together as long as possible, to consume the plutonium fuel.

This is challenging because the fission reactions increase at an exponential rate, so obviously it cant be held supercritical for long.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass

I can recommend "Raven Rock" as another good read. How very rational people and be totally irrational. Living near Raven Rock and Camp David for over 50 years, we always assumed that if the missiles started flying, we be toast in a nuclear wasteland.

He claimed it was — critical, probably deliberate technical inaccuracies notwithstanding — the best description of the process of detonating a nuclear weapon he was able to find in the open literature.

Amazing class, which also included a field trip to Oak Ridge, TN, where we got a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of the K-25 gaseous diffusion facility[1] while it was in the process of being decommissioned, and a far less interesting "tour" of the basically nonexistent public areas of the Y-12 weapons plant[2], where the only interesting things on display were the extensive security precautions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-25

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-12_National_Security_Complex

The logistics being so extreme and involving so many people is evidence against loss, not for it. Also, the US placing nukes in a place that only a few silent people are aware of is not a crime.

> Do you think presidents can smuggle a nuclear warhead across borders with a donkey or something?

Do you think they can lose them down the kitchen sink drain, or accidentally leave them in a cab?

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Best use of it is in your personal life with family, friends, retail worker in your local grocery shop etc.

The CIA would be my personal first guess