[HN Gopher] Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell on North...
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Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell on North Carolina
Author : longdefeat
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-01-25 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationalgeographic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalgeographic.com)
| umvi wrote:
| > The U.S. Government soon announced its safe return and loudly
| reassured the public that, thanks to the device's multiple safety
| systems, the bomb had never come close to exploding.
|
| Okay but seriously. How good are the safety mechanisms? Is there
| significant risk an unarmed nuke could explode if going fast
| enough or with enough vibrations?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If I understand correctly, atomic weapons have a "strong link"
| and a "weak link". The detonation won't happen without
| everything firing correctly and on time; the signal to do that
| has to pass through both the strong link and the weak link. The
| strong link isn't in place until the bomb is armed. But
| couldn't a violent-enough accident knock the strong link into
| place? Yes, but that same amount of violence would destroy the
| weak link. (That's the point of the weak link.) So even if an
| atomic bomb had an accident hard enough (and lucky enough) to
| arm it, it still couldn't explode, because the weak link would
| be broken.
| jhayward wrote:
| These days, very safe.
|
| Back then? We came within one safety of h-bombing North
| Carolina.
|
| _" The bomb's arming mechanism had six or seven steps to go
| through to detonate, and it went through all but one."_
| kryogen1c wrote:
| a relatable analog is a piece of firewood. there is enough
| combustible energy in a section of dead tree to kill or maim
| you and set off a chain reaction that will destroy everything
| in your house, but you neednt worry if you have wooden
| furnitire, even if theres a lighter on it.
| nickff wrote:
| Most warheads are actually very safe, and require either a
| detonator, or very high heat/pressure to set them off. The most
| dangerous part of most weapons is actually the propellant
| (which free-fall bombs obviously do not contain).
|
| This is a product of what weapons are designed for; the warhead
| is designed to resist premature detonation, but the fuel (and
| oxidizer if present) must be readily and easily combustible in
| an engine.
| Mindless2112 wrote:
| > _" Always/Never" shares the story of the national labs'
| history of work for the safety and security of nuclear
| weapons._
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQEB3LJ5psk
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Really, really, really good.
|
| Making a nuclear weapon actually detonate in a nuclear manner
| is one of the hard problems of making a nuclear weapon.
| Basically you have to set the explosives off just right. An
| accidental detonation of the conventional parts of the bomb
| can't do that (short of like space re-entry speeds or some
| other thing that could provide the force needed even without an
| explosion). The fear has always been around the detonation
| systems since those are the only thing realistically capable of
| setting off a nuclear explosion. Since the 1950s as detonation
| systems have gotten more reliable they've added more and more
| redundancy so those have all sorts of interlocks to prevent
| them from going off if not armed and fired. It's not like an
| airbag where if you hook up 12v to the right pins it goes bang.
| They actually need to be armed and then fired which requires a
| whole bunch of systems doing their thing in a specific order.
| The systems that arm weapons (like the aircraft and rocket side
| hardware) are relatively sophisticated and robust and a hell of
| a lot of man hours have been put into them over the years
| because the last thing you need is a risk of ordinance going
| off when you're already trying to fight a fire.
| monocasa wrote:
| Adding to this, I've heard on the grapevine that the
| parameters of the detonation sequence are generated from a
| hash of the arming code number. The arming code number isn't
| like a traditional code lock where there's a chip that's
| doing "strcmp(entered_code, CORRECT_CODE)", but instead the
| arming code number is a fundamental piece of how the bomb
| works. Without that you need the kind of state nuclear
| apparatus you'd need to build a bomb in the first place to
| reverse engineer (think a state run nuclear research lab), or
| at best you can remanufacture it into a much crappier bomb
| that probably duds to just being a dirty bomb.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Though a conventional detonation would turn it into a dirty
| bomb which while almost infinitely better than a full blown
| nuclear detonation would still ruin a good number of lives.
| blakesterz wrote:
| Interesting story.
|
| There's also one missing off the coast of GA:
|
| https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=185876...
|
| "On Feb. 5, 1958, a B-47 bomber dropped a 7,000-pound nuclear
| bomb into the waters off Tybee Island, Ga., after it collided
| with another Air Force jet. Fifty years later, the bomb -- which
| has unknown quantities of radioactive material -- has never been
| found."
| yabones wrote:
| There's also the Damascus incident, where a Titan II missile
| silo exploded during a fuelling accident and sent a 9 megaton
| thermonuclear warhead out of the silo and several hundred
| meters away. They don't officially say whether or not the core
| was inside the weapon, or if it was armed at the time... Either
| way, it's terrifying. Humans don't deserve these weapons.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...
| erdos4d wrote:
| Humans don't deserve these weapons.
|
| > You sure? Nuclear weapons are guaranteed to bite you
| eventually, being stupid enough to have them sorta implies
| you deserve your eventual reward.
| contravariant wrote:
| We're going to need a lot worse if we're ever planning to
| deflect/mine asteroids. Sometimes there are good reasons to
| invent abusable techonology.
|
| And well, of all the ways the millennia old weapons race
| could have ended, it could have been worse.
| noja wrote:
| "unknown quantities" - sure!!
| foobarian wrote:
| Another scary event off the coast of Spain:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
|
| Two of the four bombs exploded due to conventional fuses
| detonating, spreading radioactive material over land.
| MaanuAir wrote:
| And case not closed still today.
| tyingq wrote:
| Makes me curious if the radioactive material eventually gets
| exposed by corrosion or erosion.
| laumars wrote:
| I couldn't explode. You'd need the detonator to do that.
| However the radioactive content could still pollute if the
| shielding were to corrode away.
| walrus01 wrote:
| there's also this event with a B-36:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_British_Columbia_B-36_cra...
| brightball wrote:
| Also one that fell in South Carolina.
|
| https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2018/03/31/the-atomic-bom...
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Obliquely referenced by Bob Welch in 1973 on the track
| Hypnotized, by Fleetwood Mac:
|
| "I remember a talk about North Carolina and a strange, strange
| pond
|
| You see the sides were like glass In the thick of a forest
| without a road
|
| And if any man's hand ever made that land Then I think it
| would've showed"
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| Obligatory recommendation of the riveting book _Command and
| Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion
| of Safety by Eric Schlosser_
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one who immediately came into this thread
| to rec that book. It's fascinating and TERRIFYING.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Do any other countries routinely fly nuclear weapons the way we
| (US, UK, Russia etc) used to? I mean Pakistan, India, China
| maybe?
|
| Also, I thought that: at atomic bomb is pure fission, a
| thermonuclear bomb is Fusion driven by a fission bombs heat and
| pressure wave? The article seems to use the term "atomic" to
| refer to thermonuclear weapons.
| tyingq wrote:
| Israel comes to mind. Not much is known about what type of
| nuclear weapons they have.
| neartheplain wrote:
| The educated guess is somewhere between 80-400 warheads:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel
|
| They nearly used them in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I think their doomsday scenario is covered by nuclear subs
| (supposedly, no public info...)...
| ufmace wrote:
| It doesn't really make sense to fly armed weapons around as a
| strategic deterrent now, since you can mount them on missiles
| instead, which can be stored in safer and faster to launch
| silos and are harder to intercept anyways. And put them in
| submarines that are even harder to locate.
|
| Before all that, it seemed much more reasonable to do so, if
| you were concerned that your enemy might sneak their bombers
| close enough to destroy your bomber airfields before you could
| get your bombers airborne.
| stretchcat wrote:
| The way I've seen it, _atomic bomb_ and _nuclear bomb_ are
| synonyms which refer to any sort of fission, boosted fission or
| fusion bombs. Fission bombs can be specifically referred to
| like that. Fusion bombs can also be called _hydrogen bombs_ or
| _thermonuclear bombs_.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> atomic bomb is pure fission, a thermonuclear bomb is Fusion_
|
| Strictly speaking, the term "atomic bomb" shouldn't even be
| used for a fission bomb since the reactions involved are
| nuclear reactions, not chemical ("atomic") reactions.
|
| However, in non-technical contexts, I have seen "atomic bomb"
| used for both fission and fusion bombs.
| klyrs wrote:
| Do you have a source supporting this distinction?
| [deleted]
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's in the Wikipedia article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon#Fission_weapon
| s
|
| That and high-school chemistry.
| [deleted]
| philipkglass wrote:
| The Manhattan Project used the term _atomic bomb_ internally
| and externally for their invention. "Atomic" was widely used
| as a synonym for "nuclear" in both lay communication and
| technical literature for at least a generation afterward. The
| International Atomic Energy Agency is still called such and
| never felt the need to correct this imagined terminological
| mistake.
| nostrademons wrote:
| That's not what he's referring to, though. In chemistry,
| bonds between "atoms" are ordinary chemical bonds, held
| together through electromagnetic forces, and yielding
| typical chemical reactions like explosions and
| deflagrations. Fission and fusion are "nuclear" processes,
| operating between protons and neutrons within the nucleus
| of an atom only, and moderated by the strong nuclear force.
| The energy released by breaking these bonds is orders of
| magnitude greater, and what we normally refer to as a
| "nuclear" explosion. Calling it "nuclear" vs. "atomic"
| conveys useful information about what's actually going on
| when it detonates.
| rtkwe wrote:
| No one really does it any more and the practice only lasted a
| around a decade even in the US. Once ICBMs became reliable
| enough they largely replaced bombers because it was much easier
| to dig a bunker than to constantly have bombers on standby or
| in the air and they provided a better strike capability because
| there's no real defense vs bombers that could be intercepted.
| Giorgi wrote:
| There is defense and it's pre-emptive strike, being static is
| one of the weakness of such system, that's why there are subs
| and Russia (S.U.) has some of the nukes on the trucks.
|
| There also was a railway version, SS-24 Scalpel (RT-23 UTTKh)
| which was mounted inside always-on-the-move train locomotion.
| Decommissioned in 2005 but they have new version in
| development.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There's a distinction between defense and deterrence the
| former stops something that's been done, eg shooting down
| missiles and bombers, and the latter in the nuclear context
| is always maintaining the ability to strike back.
|
| A pre-emptive strike isn't defense it's just starting the
| war and it also doesn't prevent you from being struck.
|
| Unless you're in Cuba firing at the US or Europe aiming at
| Russia there's always time to launch a retaliatory strike
| before the first missiles hit and missile bases were
| designed to survive really close hits. That's part of why
| the US freaked out so much about missiles coming to Cuba
| and why Russia developed more mobile launch capability than
| the US. The only real 'defense' against and ICBM (at the
| time we're maybe figuring out real defenses now) was to be
| able to survive to strike back which isn't so much a
| defense as deterrent.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Colloquially "atomic bomb" usually refers to both fission and
| fusion weapons. Almost no weapons currently in use by major
| nation-states are pure fission devices. Two-stage thermonuclear
| Teller-Ulam designs are more stable, easier to control the
| yield, capable of scaling up to 1000x the power, and cheaper to
| manufacture once you have the technology. A major part of the
| cost of nuclear weapons is enriching uranium or producing
| plutonium; fusion weapons can use a much smaller amount of
| these expensive materials and get the bulk of their yield from
| deuterium, which is distilled from water. Pure fission weapons
| were used in some artillery shells (where there isn't enough
| room to get a second stage in) and by emerging nuclear powers
| that haven't yet developed the technology for fusion weapons.
|
| Non-colloquially, scientists would probably refer specifically
| to "fission" and "fusion" weapons, or to specific design used
| (eg. gun-type linear implosion, explosive lens, Teller-Ulam).
| pinewurst wrote:
| There's also the intermediate case of boosted fission, where
| tritium gas is introduced into the fission core, generating
| neutrons via fusion, that in turn accelerate/enhance the
| fission process (e.g. allowing more fission energy to be
| released in the interval between detonation and when the
| device blows itself apart).
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Thanks for your excellent comment! I didn't know most
| advanced powers were using fusion weapons but it makes
| perfect sense when you say it (cost, stability, power and
| controlability).
| mkehrt wrote:
| FWIW, I would use your distinction as well. "Atomic" to me
| means fission only, where "thermonuclear" means fusion and
| "nuclear" could mean either. But other comments seem to show
| this is not universal.
| walrus01 wrote:
| you'd have to be a madman to fly around with 'live' ready to
| use nuclear bombs in the modern era, but then again, strategic
| air command was headed by a madman, curtis lemay... and they
| did it from the early 1950s for 25+ years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command
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