

Two nuclear bombs nearly detonated in North Carolina in 1961 - rodrigocoelho
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/12/us/north-carolina-nuclear-bomb-drop/index.html

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1qaz2wsx3edc
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-
yF35g&list=UU3XTzVzaHQEd30rQbuvCtTQ)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2bxfzq/john_oliv...](http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2bxfzq/john_oliver_on_nuclear_weapons/)

It's pretty frakked up.

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

None of this is settling.

~~~
bluedino
It was posted here 10 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056)

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

~~~
dang
Thanks. Burying as dupe.

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api
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.

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mixmax
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.

~~~
Already__Taken
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.

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

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

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

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CapitalistCartr
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=6419056)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910)

~~~
ceejayoz
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".

