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Comment by indrora | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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