Slashdot Mirror
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')."
... 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
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
Three people at a test reactor is sad but pretty small potatoes compared to the Scorpion, Thresher, and the six Russian/Soviet subs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_nuclear_submarines
"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.
Ridiculous amount of safeguards? While permissive action links (requiring codes for launch) were created and deployed at the urging of Defense Secretary McNamara after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Air Force kept the codes set to all zeros until President Carter found out about it. That was over ten years later. The Air Force kept the codes at all zeros so they could launch without presidential authority. Source: http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm. To quote, "And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO." So, when you say ridiculous amount of safeguards, I'm not buying it without verification.
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
Yeah, British nukes were protected with "Bike Locks"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7097101.stm
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
The safeguards the OP refers to are the ones that prevent detonation, not the ones that prevent launch. Different safeguards for different purposes.
PALs are not intended to prevent launch without Presidential authority, PALs are intended to prevent weapons that fall into unauthorized hands from being used. Which is why the USAF kept PALs active on gravity bombs and disabled them on the silos and why the Army used them on their AFAPs - and why USN SSBN's never had them in the first place.
Actually, no. The situation in Europe was known to be perfectly conductive to a huge war even before Franz got himself shot. There were a lot of incidents happening, any of which could had ignited the poweder keg and started a war, and one of which was pretty much guaranteed to do just that. That it war Franz getting shot that did is, to put it bluntly, completely irrelevant: WWI was caused by opposing alliances and several people actively wanting a war, and using Franz Ferdinand's murder as an excuse to get one.
As for Lehman Brothers collapsing, it should not come as surprise to anyone that a bank that ties a significant amount of its capital into obfuscatingly complex schemes is likely to do just that, altought I suppose it is a bit surprising that the elite didn't bail their buddies out there.
Kid, I've browsed from one side of this Internet to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful equation controlling everything. There's no mystical feather field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple statistical tricks and nonsense.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
In other news, aliens with advanced weaponry might invade the earth tomorrow, and that would be a real game changer. So we need to start working on a counteroffensive NOW!
What you're missing with all your melodrama is that nobody is saying it would be impossible for rogues or terrorists to get a nuclear-capable device. But if it happens, it's not likely to be one that was the object of the largest search effort for a man-made device ever in the history of the world that still failed to find it. And these nukes aren't so special. Your hypothetical terrorists don't need to find these particular devices, because there are easier ways to get their hands on some other nuclear device. Nobody needs to plan specifically for the contingency that some terrorists find this particular nuclear device. They just need to plan for the general contingency that terrorists find some kind of nuclear device. A terrorist finding these particular devices is not a black swan event, because it would be no different from a terrorist getting a nuclear device via more reasonable means. And I don't even think a terrorist finding a nuclear device is a black swan event. Everybody is aware that the risk is there, and everybody is aware that it would be a really big deal. That's why there's a lot of time and effort directed at avoiding that very thing.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.