I can think of about 50 more dangerous things I'd rather not pass on the highway.
The truck carrying a nuclear warhead is about a squillion times more dangerous than the warhead itself.
Trucks have killed more people than nuclear weapons ever will.
While sitting next to a nuke and not really knowing how safe it was was a bit scary the actions of the security dudes when people started getting out of their cars to stretch their legs was far more scary - they were actively menacing while trying not to give away why they were there or that the unmarked truck between their vehicles was in any way special (despite being stupidly obvious)
Secondly, is that a fair comparison? There are approximately as many trucks, and as many nuclear warheads, as the market demands.
No, but there have been plenty of accidents with live nuclear warheads (including losing them in the ocean!). The fact one hasn't gone off is more a matter of there not being a ton of them in the first place.
There doesn't appear to be a consistent theory as to why we aren't all dead from nukes.
Your claiming there aren't enough of them to be dangerous, while elsewhere in the thread someone is trying to scare us with a very large number.
I'm willing to bet $1000 neither of us dies from a injuries sustained due to proximity to an accidental nuclear detonation of the warhead variety.
We haven't had a nuclear war...
> Your claiming there aren't enough of them to be dangerous, while elsewhere in the thread someone is trying to scare us with a very large number.
I'm not claiming that at all, I'm just saying that just because one hasn't been accidentally detonated doesn't mean a whole lot. The biggest danger is surely an intentional detonation, but accidents do happen.
71 years have passed since the first nuclear bombs were used. That's 71 years without an accidental detonation nor a nuclear weapon used in an act of aggression on enemy soil.
Nuclear weapons exist and we aren't doing too bad of a job coping with that.
But, I suppose, as Steven Pinker is fond of saying: no one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.[2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/books/review/the-better-an...
Given the many. many known nuclear close calls (And I'm just counting the ones that were likely to cause a nuclear war - not domestic mishandling of materials), this is an insane position to take, with our current nuclear arsenals.
Four times in our nuclear history, the decision of one man saved us from armageddon. We are only having this conversation because people like Stanislav Petrov made the right decision - after the entire command-and-control system surrounding them failed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
Going 71 years without it is compatible with all of those numbers, yet they mean very different things for our ability to prevent nukes from being used, and for our likely future.
I personally don't find it particularly comforting that we've made it this far. Just because we've made it 71 years doesn't mean we'll make it another 71.
Probably because launching a nuclear attack doesn't benefit nation states, if other nation states also have nuclear weapons. Also, all large high GDP nation states currently have intertwined economic dependencies, which also makes it less likely they would be inclined to launch nukes at each other.
Obviously, at the moment, North Korea stands out as a potential exception here, but they have nowhere near the number of warheads or industrial capacity to even play on the MAD doctrine level - they're certainly far from becoming anything like the next USSR.
So the only really remaining scenarios that could lead to a nuclear attack (barring massive changes in the current geopolitical order) would be that some non-nation-state actor, perhaps with fanatical motivations, gains access to a nuclear weapon. Although, in this case, without the state infrastructure to actually launch multiple warheads at the same time, it's unlikely that such an attack would be in any sense civilization-ending (even though it would certainly be very devastating, of course).
That's exactly the level they're playing at.
My vaguely informed guess is that the probability of nuclear war is around 1% per year. This is roughly consistent with what we saw during the Cold War (both the lack of a nuclear war and the numerous instances in which it almost happened) and seems to be consistent with the way things are set up today.
Nuclear weapons can't detonate from being physically damaged. They might explode and scatter their contents about from the explosives in the core, but they won't reach criticality in anything other then an intentional, triggered detonation.
> “Until my death I will never forget hearing my sergeant say, 'Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch.' And I said, 'Great.' He said, 'Not great. It’s on arm.'” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash#Bomb...
Also what you are describing is "One Point Safety" in which an external explosion or fire can cause a nuclear detonation. This is mostly true for the current US arsenal, but wasn't in the past. It's one of the main reasons why the Little Boy design was so poor for safety, it only required one (preferably intentional) explosion
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...
It has happened before, but fortunately without the detonation.
The Hiroshima enriched uranium bomb was about as safe as an IED. It would have gone off if it hit the ground hard or was in a fire. The bomber crew had orders to dump the bomb in deep water if they had to abort the mission and return to base. Landing on Tinian with the bomb was considered far too risky.
You get the truck, and I get the nuclear warhead. Sound fair?
Well, we don't know that exactly as long as we keep stockpiling them throughout the world.
Or maybe you meant trucks, there does seem to be an ever increasing amount of those.
There must be several orders of magnitude more steel rolling around the streets and highways, crashing in to people's living rooms, moving down cyclists, being used as weapons by drunks and crazies.
Threat of nuclear destruction doesn't factor in to my threat analysis at all. I'm more worried about data corruption in my photos backups, or my dog getting hit by a car, or dropping a 5000kg load of steel on myself, or someone else, at work.
one nuclear weapon in the wrong hands could change that.
I rest my case.
> During the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union both deployed nonstrategic nuclear weapons for use in the field during a conflict. While there are several ways to distinguish between strategic and nonstrategic nuclear weapons, most analysts consider nonstrategic weapons to be shorter-range delivery systems with lower yield warheads that might be used to attack troops or facilities on the battlefield. They have included nuclear mines; artillery; short-, medium-, and long-range ballistic missiles; cruise missiles; and gravity bombs. In contrast with the longer-range “strategic” nuclear weapons, these weapons had a lower profile in policy debates and arms control negotiations, possibly because they did not pose a direct threat to the continental United States. At the end of the 1980s, each nation still had thousands of these weapons deployed with their troops in the field, aboard naval vessels, and on aircraft.
> In 1991, the United States and Soviet Union both withdrew from deployment most and eliminated from their arsenals many of their nonstrategic nuclear weapons. The United States now has approximately 760 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, with around 200 deployed with aircraft in Europe and the remaining stored in the United States. Estimates vary, but experts believe Russia still has between 1,000 and 6,000 warheads for nonstrategic nuclear weapons in its arsenal. The Bush Administration quietly redeployed and removed some of the nuclear weapons deployed in Europe. Russia, however seems to have increased its reliance on nuclear weapons in its national security concept. Some analysts argue that Russia has backed away from its commitments from 1991 and may develop and deploy new types of nonstrategic nuclear weapons.
> The Soviet Union produced and deployed a wide range of delivery vehicles for nonstrategic nuclear weapons. At different times during the period, it deployed devices that were small enough to fit into a suitcase-sized container, nuclear mines, shells for artillery, short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, short-range air-delivered missiles, and gravity bombs. The Soviet Union deployed these weapons at nearly 600 bases, with some located in Warsaw Pact nations in Eastern Europe, some in the non-Russian republics on the western and southern perimeter of the nation and throughout Russia. Estimates vary, but many analysts believe that, in 1991, the Soviet Union had more than 20,000 of these weapons. The numbers may have been higher, in the range of 25,000 weapons in earlier years, before the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
Even not taking the physical dimensions into account, the physics packages tend to be very heavy (which is mostly dictated by physics involved and trying to make the enclosure smaller seems to make it heavier, which makes sense given the physics).
In all I don't see how such weapon would be relevant for terrorist tactics, because using similar amount of effort one could just place large enough chemical explosive charge to cause significant (although several orders of magnitude smaller than from small nuclear warhead) damage.
Even the larger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
would easily fit, and those suitcases even have wheels so it would not look all that heavy to someone not lugging it.
Let's just say that portable nukes are a very, very bad thing. A single 1kT nuke in the centre of a city would be very bad news on its own, and would make 9-11 look like a footnote. (1kT is a realistic yield for the ultra-portable Mk-54 warhead.)
Strategically, tiny nukes in small numbers are far more worrying than ICBMs, because unlike ICBMs they don't come with a built-in warning time or a sender's address.
That maybe not, but the radioactive signature may give away the origin of the material.
That doesn't mean that's the party that planted it but it is at least going to provide a hint as to who initially put the warhead together.
Does this skepticism come from thinking "briefcase" rather than "suitcase," or...?
That's much smaller than a suitcase. Heavy, sure, but quite a bit smaller than the carry-on suitcase I was lugging around last week, and I've got a small one compared to the monstrosities that are considered to be carry-on sized now.