
An Unanswered Question at the Heart of America's Nuclear Arsenal - vo2maxer
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/an-unanswered-question-at-the-heart-of-americas-nuclear-arsenal/
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dboreham
I think anyone who has any engineering experience would suspect that never
testing something will eventually result in it not functioning.

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sumanthvepa
Please, please DO NOT test a nuclear weapon. The world will be far better off
if everyones nuclear weapon turned out to be a dud.

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DennisP
True, but if just one side's nuclear weapons are actually duds, and the other
side figures that out, that's not such a great situation.

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sumanthvepa
I know. I know. But imagine the comedy of epic proportions that would ensue if
WW3 consisted of all sides desperately pushing the big red button and nothing
happens!

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tw04
Yes, that would be hilarious. Instead of half of the worlds population being
wiped out by nukes, we'd be wiped out by chemical weapons, airstrikes, and
ground warfare.

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ClumsyPilot
Alternative scenario: The imbeciles are lynched in the street by angry crowds,
many enquiries follow, life continues as normal.

I know anyone alive today, not suffering from a mental illness, that would
accept their leaders starting a global nuclear war.

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tw04
I would wager roughly 49% of the American voting public would be fine with
Trump starting a Nuclear war. They didn't bat an eye at him assassinating an
Iranian general. Or praising leaders like Kim in North Korea. They don't mind
his rampant corruption to date or abuses of power.

Mind you, that's not a majority of the actual population given how low voter
turnout is, but that's enough to be really scary.

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ClumsyPilot
I think the number is far too high, in my experience partisan people sober up
remarkably quickly once their ass is on the line.

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baybal2
Russia and China remelt their pits every few years. That's more or less a
public knowledge. I'm surprised that US doesn't do the same

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drtillberg
As a child I thought it would have been completely hilarious if the leaders of
the free world solemnly decided to destroy it by a large scale nuclear
exchange, only to find much to their surprise that none of the warheads
functioned due to age and lack of testing.

I say leave the missiles and warheads exactly the way they are and let anyone
with the temerity to order a first strike deal cognitively with the risk that
the world might survive their decision.

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nirav72
I think that might be the established thought behind most of the world's
nuclear arsenal. No one knows if they might all work. But the fact that some
countries have them will give their adversaries second thought. See North
Korea as an example. They tested one crude device few years ago. But no one
outside of the NK regime know for sure if their nukes are deployable with a
delivery system. But it doesn't matter. The fact that they have the capability
makes even the U S pause and consider if regime change is a viable option
there.

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baybal2
That's a special case.

The most likely case for somebody other than a great power making a nuclear
arsenal, and ever thinking of nuclear first strike will be somebody:

1\. Living in a very bad neighbourhood

2\. Being extremely secretive

3\. Not having reputation for bluffing, considering winning a war a matter of
existential national importance

If we are to see military use of nukes happening this century, most likely you
will see it where you never saw it coming, in a scenario of extreme power
imbalance.

Saying this again, for anybody who is desperate enough to bet on a nuke for a
military advantage, is already in such a dire straight, that they are already
pass the point of using atomic weapons as a deterrent.

They will hold it as the top military secret till the "day X"

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JumpCrisscross
A world with broadly-held would have civil wars fought with them.

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Nasrudith
The blame slinging seems a bit unwarranted given the understandable
constraints on detonation tests.

The two plauisble outcomes even as a laymen are either the plutonium's decay
results in less energetic nuclear explosions as lost to atomic decay or the
breakdown products "poison" it to a dud which cannot sustain fission. The
other unlikely result is a "meltdown state". The decay chains would presumably
be calculable without any destruction.

The composition could potentially be destructively tested by centrifuges and
chromatography suitable for weapons grade radioactives - possibly resulting in
just some low level possibly atomic waste instead of a detonation.

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baybal2
That has more to do with metallurgy than with nuclear physics. It's clear that
decay and fission products need at least 100 years to accumulate in any
significant amount to affect munition performance.

Pure plutonium has 6 metallurgical phases, and alloys used in pits add even
more to metallurgic issues.

Imagine an implosion design going through a brittle failure instead of an
orderly compaction of a hollow pit? Or worse, one side of a pit went through
phase transition, and the other don't and you don't even get a fizzle.

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theseadroid
On an unrelated note, I highly recommend this episode about nuclear weapons
from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: [https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-
history-59-the-destroyer-...](https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-
history-59-the-destroyer-of-worlds/)

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svara
I have this naive fantasy where every country that has nuclear weapons
independently and secretly came to the conclusion that keeping them
operational is ultimately more dangerous than not (due to accidents, human
error, clinically insane leadership, ...), and just removed the detonators and
unplugged the big red buttons. The nuclear deterrent remains, but is now
actually based on a collective fiction. We've discovered the ultimate
defensive weapon, one that only needs to exist in our imaginations ;)

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streb-lo
The major problem with 'global zero' initiatives is that if one nation can
achieve nuclear primacy they become the de-facto owners of the world. No one
wants to risk that.

Alternatively, the problem with not pursuing global zero is that the
probability that someone will eventually use them approaches 100% in long
enough timescales.

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PopeDotNinja
When pits degrade, what is happening? Is it merely a function of the
radioactive isotopes decaying below the point at which they'll detonate in a
big ol' fireball?

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opwieurposiu
Pu is an unusual metal. It has at least 6 different solid allotropes (phases),
each of which have different density, hardness etc. The phase can change over
time, kind of like how an old chocolate bar can become white and crumbly or
soft and chewy. You build your bomb expecting your Pu to be in the δ phase
(delta phase). If your pit has changed into a different phase due to age, the
explosive lenses will not compress it correctly and you will get a dud or
reduced yield.

    
    
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_plutonium

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coder1001
Can these things be tested in space? Instead of doing a test on earth, push
something way out to space and test it, what would the impact be on earth if
it was far away?

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jasonjayr
Probably yes, and probably safely once in space, but the difficulty is that it
has to travel from the ground through the atmosphere to get to space, and
sometimes rockets fail on the way up, creating a bigger problem when they fall
back down.

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HenryKissinger
It's inevitable that if the US is to keep a nuclear arsenal, thousands of new
nuclear weapons will have to be manufactured...

... and tested?

The U.S. government could announce to the world a temporary resumption of
atmospheric nuclear tests, in violation of several binding treaties, in the
name of practical necessity. Such a step would not be taken lightly. A series
of tests could be conducted over a few months to test new bomb designs, as
well as the older Minutemen and B61s. Those tests could take place at the old
Nevada Test Site and in the Pacific.

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galangalalgol
Why atmospheric? Just cost? Ground test or sending it out to L1 seem
reasonable.

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HenryKissinger
In a real context, nuclear weapons will be detonated above ground, and you
can't test heat damage and overpressure as a function of distance from the
blast, with underground tests.

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flyingfences
We already have sufficient models for how these warheads will perform _if_
they work. The question at hand is _whether_ they work - an underground test
would give a measure of yield.

