There are a lot more trucks than there are nuclear warheads. If there were as many warheads, and they went as many miles as trucks, I expect that accidental detonations would be a lot more common.
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.