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Comment by onemoresoop | Hacker News Reader

Its surprising to me that bombs explode after being buried for such a long time. The chemicals remain contained but I imagined the fuse would rust away.

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The irony here is that nuclear weapons are actually safer to have lying around than conventional weapons; The amount of work that it takes to actually arm and activate a warhead is higher and you get basically one chance to get it right or it locks you out and self-defeats.

For anyone who is curious, there's a wonderful short video on PALs and how they isolate a nuclear warhead from the outside world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LPmAF2eNA

Everyone knows about PALs. You have to warm them up in the steel mill and then cool them down in the freezer room.

However, that does not stop adversaries with physical access from dismantling the warhead and extracting the enriched fissile material. In a practical sense, easily obtained nuclear weapons are probably more dangerous than TNT UXO, or at least possess the potential to be used for greater harm.

Nukes are also not very stable long-term Their fissile payload is radioactive after all, and as it decays it becomes harder and harder to achieve prompt criticality.

They're more stable in the sense that it takes active effort to move them to the exploded state, while chemical explosives need active efforts to keep them unexploded.

I was using "stable" in the "shelf stable" sense rather than the "chemically stable" sense. I can see how that is ambiguous in this context.

Nukes are full of conventional explosives, plus the radioactive pit. A failed nuclear detonation is still a dirty bomb.

Right it's not like the PAL unlock codes were just "00000000" or anything:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040404013440/http:/www.cdi.org/...

It can be caused by the explosives degrading over decades into much more unstable compounds which begin the explosive reaction and detonate the rest. In other words degrading into a new sort of fuse which spontaneously triggers.

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