Two nuclear bombs nearly detonated in North Carolina in 1961 | Hacker News Reader

Two nuclear bombs nearly detonated in North Carolina in 1961

cnn.com

16 pointsrodrigocoelho11 comments

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I'm guessing this popped up here after appearing on reddit yesterday. John Oliver did a good report on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g&list=UU3XTzVzaHQ...

http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2bxfzq/john_oliv...

It's pretty frakked up.

Edit: Oh, and the cold war is heating up: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2c1emy/russia_may...

None of this is settling.

It was posted here 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056

And it was posted here a few weeks ago as well.

Thanks. Burying as dupe.

Had this occurred, I wonder if it would have immediately been interpreted as a Soviet strike and started WWIII?

Stuff like this makes me wonder about quantum immortality. Maybe we just inhabit one of the slices of the multiverse where we didn't die.

It's easy to be snarky about nuclear weapons almost going off time and time again from the 50's to the 70's and maybe later, but when you look more closely it's actually an incredibly difficult design challenge.

A nuclear bomb has two design criteria that are at odds with each other; On the one hand it must under no circumstances detonate when it isn't suppposed to. On the other hand it must be easy to detonate when it's supposed to.

How do you design a fail-safe system that lives up to those two criteria?

It's a lot harder than it sounds.

Well a lot of that starts with not flying them across your own country fully armed.

Nukes are incredible hard to set off, you could blow one up with a missile. It would be a mess but that is not enough to set off the full on detonation of the core material.

The scary thing isn't a nuke going off accidentally, I mean if you keep enough of them it's just a certainty on a timeline. The scary thing is a miscommunication about whose it was, and the vengeful actions that follow.

Blitznews... Eric Schlosser already wrote about it in his book "Command and Control"

The nagasaki bomb was actually only 2% of a megaton (21kt).

Great example of a news anchor mangling technical details in this link.

Again??? How many times are we gonna rehash this? Yeah, we dropped them all over the place until 1970.

Here's a couple:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910

The difference here is this part, I think:

> The impact of the crash put it in the "armed" setting. Fortunately -- once again -- it damaged another part of the bomb needed to initiate an explosion.

That's a lot close than "whoops, we dropped one".

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