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DoD Report On 32 "Nuclear Accidents"
natebjones writes "Remember the time the US Air Force accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on a family in South Carolina? [This DoD report lists] that and 31 other nuclear accidents including: nuclear bombs inadvertently falling through bomb bay doors; the accidental firing of a retrorocket on an ICBM; the vast dispersal of radioactive debris; and the loss of enriched fissile material and nuclear bombs (which are 'still out there somewhere')."
It ain't so new, and it ain't so clear.
Free Martian Whores!
... while "nuclear weapons accident" sounds scary, it almost always involves a malfunction or mistake that can't set off a detonation. It's pretty hard to split an atom, which is why we poured billions into learning how during the Manhattan Project. Tom Clancy's book The Sum of All Fears had a scenario where terrorists acquired an Israeli warhead lost in the desert during the 1973 war. But almost all of the "lost" warheads from USAF are in the ocean, where they can do no harm.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It's specifically a list of accidents with nuclear weapons, not just any old nuclear accidents. (Just mentioning that since there are some of those in the military as well. For example the SL-1 which is notable since it killed 3 people, including one guy who got accidently nailed to the ceiling.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
right, because no one would bother looking for them
you lack imagination. plenty of other people don't lack imagination, and plenty of them mean you harm. so make up for your imagination gap, or you will someday suffer for it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The conclusion at the end was pretty ignorant.
This small sampling of harrowing accounts clearly chinks the counter-intuitive and commonly argued position that nuclear weapons actually make the world a safer place. It reminds us that the shattering blast and fiery rain of a nuclear detonation may not occur because of war, terrorism, or miscalculation, but rather, because of something more common: an "accident."
Nuclear deterrence / M.A.D. theory has never been proposed as a way to prevent "A" individual nuclear detonation, so the article claiming that they've somehow proven it is not exactly insightful. However, it is a very reasonable and successful way to prevent "ALL" nukes from detonating aka full out total nuclear strategic warfare WWIII.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
" the accidental firing of a retrorocket on an ICBM;" You use retro rockets to de orbit. ICBMs don't go into orbit they use a ballistic trajectory.
I would like to know more details about that little comment.
Frankly this is a big so what. None of the listed accidents are new and I think they are all in the Wikipedia and have been listed for years.
They left out the Titan II explosion in the 80s that blew a multi mega warhead a good distance from the silo and caused the Air Force to retire the Titan II.
Hey on the bright side in the 50s and 60s every major US city was ringed with Nike SAM sites and some of them had nuclear warheads on them. They have all been retired for a good long while.
This is so not news it is at best a badly written history lesson. Actually it is nothing but political diatribe on how evil nuclear weapons are. Frankly this should be pushed to the politics page or just not on Slashdot since it tells us nothing new. Heck the freaking learning channel covered this a few years ago.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's actually very easy, and happens naturally all the time. Natural decay is what makes radioactive substances radioactive. The hard part is separating out the enriched uranium. Once you do that it's very easy to make a bomb out of it.
Fusing atoms, now that's difficult.
Best Slashdot Co
Not really nuclear accidents. Nuke Weapons have a ridiculous amount of safeguards and settings needed to happen to actually go off. So it is impossible for a true nuclear weapon accidents. Maybe call em' accidents that involved nuclear weapons. any other phrase is alarmism
The explosion in San Antonio was around the same as a 500 lb bomb. It shattered windows in town. That was a bunker accident. Other accidents had no explosion of the weapon.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.
... while "nuclear weapons accident" sounds scary...(stuff deleted).... But almost all of the "lost" warheads from USAF are in the ocean, where they can do no harm.
Two words: Dolphin Terrorists
The biggest nuclear disaster was the movie with John Travolta, Christian Slater, and that hot chick. Man, that movie stunk. Howie Long saying "You da man!" could wipe out an entire town.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
You guys... you're always so negative. When are we going to see a headline on /. that says another day comes to a close where the world didn't end?
Plane burned up on an ice runway, releasing the Nuke, that promptly detonated the conventional explosives, which scattered the nuclear material all over the place. Supposedly, part of the core melted through the ice, and dropped into the sea, but there was still thousands of barrels of radioactive ice/snow being stored there.
I mean, if some terrorists have paid a hefty sum for them, why wouldn't they use them ASAP instead of waiting until they're discovered? Especially since it isn't all that unlikely that if any officials in Russia have indeed sold nukes, they might get second thoughts about what they've done and speak up, if their conscience can't take it anymore.
...from the documentary The Fog of War, the combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons means there WILL be an accidental discharge eventually. And, he should know. His entire life was a mistake.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Car crashes stopped being called accidents (now they a called MVC's motor vehicle collisions) because there is no such thing as a accident. Just carelessness and negligence.
you have no imagination
just because something is difficult or improbable, doesn't mean it won't get done. in fact, it is improbable events, with major implications, that pretty much define the whole game. from politics, to economics, to military campaigns, to history itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
the point is this: don't worry about every improbable event, but DO worry about improbable events that radically change the game. some improbable events have extremely huge consequences. know them. make contingencies around them. good military intelligence is all about their analysis
our entire historical narrative is pretty much a litany of black swans. from the assassination of the archduke of austria to the collapse of lehman brothers: we talk about these historical events as inevitable. but thats all argument after the fact, hindsight, that's easy. however, shortly before lehman's collapse, or franz ferdinand's little trip to sarajevo, no one was seriously predicting anything remotely like what was about to happen, and yet these events changed absolutely everything
so you worry about the black swans. you worry about nukes sitting on the seabed that "nobody" will find
the black swans control your fate, my fate, the fate of the entire world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
no, you meant pepper you fucking idiot
... too bad it's not accurate, as is the case quite often on /.
If the CmdrTaco had actually read the PDF instead of just the rant article, he/she would have found out that it's a list of already publicized events that sometimes involved nuclear weapons. Quite often the events involved just parts of weapons but mostly bombs without their nuclear material. I had to read up to page 11 to find an incident that involved a bomb in "strike" configuration.
Oh, and the bomb in South Carolina didn't fall on a family. Their house was wrecked because it happened to unfortunately be closest to where the bomb's high explosives went off, not because the bomb fell on it.
and by "chile" I meant "chilean food", not "chilli"
Wow, you must have been really hungary.
Ezekiel 23:20
Since they never found the weapon in question, how did they even know which safety mechanisms had failed and which were still functioning?
Three friends recently spent an evening sharing drinks and exchanging insults at a local cafe in the southeastern province of Svay Rieng. Their companionable arguing continued for hours, until one man pulled out a 25-year-old unexploded anti-tank mine found in his backyard.
He tossed it under the table, and the three men began playing Russian roulette, each tossing down a drink and then stamping on the mine. The other villagers fled in terror.
Minutes later, the explosive detonated with a tremendous boom, killing the three men in the bar. "Their wives could not even find their flesh because the blast destroyed everything," the Rasmei Kampuchea newspaper reported.
I would think that the lost sub reactors are the real threat. Since they make heat, they can be more easily found by the heat bloom on the surface (IR satellite pictures) and tracking back (the ocean current). That might be within the means of a non state actor or a small state that wants nukes. Sub reactors tend to use very enriched fuel too. I think before that happens, some government (perhaps USA) should find and recover them. Having one would make it all too easy for someone to build a couple bombs (at least).
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I'm sure most people here have heard about the Documentaries made by Peter Kuran, but in case you have not, I suggest watching this movie http://www.vce.com/nuc911.html (Nuclear 911) about nuclear weapons accidents, and also the other films from the same director. All of them have superb scenes and music.
www.meneguzzi.eu/felipe
Reading the reactions to this article are quite amusing. On one hand you have the people who like to pretend nuclear bombs are fragile things that can be set off by merely dropping them. Or to take it further: "Look at how irresponsible our evil military was with nukes!!!"
Then you have the other set of folks who seem to be of the mindset of "a little radiation never hurt anything!". Or to take it further: "How dare you question my beloved military, and their completely safe nuclear bombs?!?"
It's good to see there are still a few rational people around who realize there is some middle ground here. The military has a pretty damn good safety record when it comes to handling nuclear weapons, even though they were weapons that never really should have been built in the numbers they were.
as homer says blame it on the guy who doesn't speak English!
Dave: open the bomb bay doors hal. Hal: Dave, sorry I can't do that Dave: Why not hal ? Hal: Because the bomb bay doors are already open, we lost the cargo over somewhere unimportant like New Mexico
gee, that's funny, since that's part of my point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy
so, to summarize, you regurgitate part of my point back at me, as if you are refuting me
Kid, I've browsed from one side of this Internet to the other.
thanks for the patronization, dad. but apparently you haven't been around enough to even coherently understand and refute what i'm fucking saying in the first place. if i may be so patronizing as you, i think you need to see more sides of the internet, kid
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Several people on this discussion, including LWATCDR and Sanat, make very good points; this is really Old News.
I was a program manager at The Directorate of Nuclear Surety (now AFSC/SEWA) for three years. While there, I read the reports on all of these accidents.
In my personal opinion (NOT the opinion of the DoD or USAF), Nuclear Surety is astronomically better with modern weapons than with those prior to the early 1960s. This is mainly due to better technology such as; one-point safe designs, Permissive Action Links (events in the Jimuh Carter years notwithstanding), modern initiator explosives, Environmental Sensing Devices, and vastly improved computer modelling techniques. Not to mention some fiendishly clever engineering tricks employed in the physics packages of modern designs.
Also, as better technology became available, the DoD employed better procedures and tactics. An example of this is the USAF abandonment of Airborne for Ground Alert in the early '60s.
A few good books pertaining to this subject are;
Chuck Hansen's U.S. Nuclear Weapons (apparently out of print; and with an astronomical price tag)
Operation Crossroads by J. M. Weisgall
Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes
Happy Reading!
The June 7th 1960 BOMARC incident was initially reported to have release "minimal" contamination. This was later found out to be wrong to the extent where everyone involved denied any intentional "misdeeds".
Hungary for Turkey!
nomnomnom
These are of no consequence. These accidents are fer less significant than traffic accidents that happen every day, not to mention plane crashes. This is just one more attempt by yet another idiot to libel nuclear weapons. He doesn't understand them, and rather than learn, he would rather spread his ignorance to others. Or else, he's just a douchebag trying to make a buck by spreading fud. Either way, don't give him the satisfaction.
Hey... so I was not really awake when I typed this comment. I know C4 was a terrible example - they used to burn it in campfires in Vietnam, for example.
Replace C4 with, say, dynamite.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
They are not very big reactors so that is very unlikely.
Who dat?
Who dat who say, "Who dat?"
Who dat who say, "Who dat?" when I say, "Who dat?"