Before the introduction of permissive action links (PAL), nuclear weapons could be operated and detonated by almost anyone.
> The exact details are hazy, but the broad contours are clear: the inspection team found the control of the forward-based nuclear weapons inadequate and possibly illegal. In Germany and Turkey they viewed scenes that were particularly distressing. On the runway stood a German (or Turkish) quick-reaction alert airplane (QRA) loaded with nuclear weapons and with a foreign pilot in the cockpit. The QRA airplane was ready to take off at the earliest warning, and the nuclear weapons were fully operational. The only evidence of U.S. control was a lonely 18-year-old sentry armed with a carbine and standing on the tarmac. When the sentry at the German airfield was asked how he intended to maintain control of the nuclear weapons should the pilot suddenly decide to scramble (either through personal caprice or through an order from the German command circumventing U.S. command), the sentry replied that he would shoot the pilot; Agnew directed him to shoot the bomb.
The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were a wild time. Tens of thousands of deadly devices in the hands of two superpowers armed to the teeth, and not a single rogue general. Not one single device sold to terrorists on the black market. It's a miracle we made it out alive.
I see your article mentions this, but I love to highlight this one story:
Strategic air command opposed the installation of these locks. Their stated concern was they would interfere with a launch order, but some think they just resented civilian control.
So they allegedly worked around them. For years, the passcode keeping nuclear war at bay was 00000000
Hardly rogue. In his own words - his job was to supervise the radar system and make judgement calls. He judged the detection of a single "missile" to be a false positive sincea a NATO would have consisted of a massed first strike rather than a single bogey. Petrov simply did his job.
"the Soviet Union's strategy was an immediate and compulsory nuclear counter-attack against the United States (launch on warning), specified in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction."
Nation states, sure, they've probably bought a few, but I think the evidence points to no terrorists.
If a nation state has a nuke, it's in their interest to hold it as deterrent. As soon as it's used, anyone seeking accountability knows whom to visit. Eg Pakistan, Israel, NK have all been holding for years with motive to use them, but haven't.
If a terrorist group has a nuke, it's in their interest to use it asap. If they delay, it might be taken away from them. If they use it, they achieve the attention and blood they seek, while the world doesn't know where they all live (assuming good opsec) and where they might have more. This might indicate they don't have any.
> Nation states, sure, they've probably bought a few […] If a nation state has a nuke, it's in their interest to hold it as deterrent.
It also is in their interest to let ‘them’ know they have an atomic bomb. Of course, they could have done that secretly, but I think the world at large would know of it, anyways. Since that hasn’t happened (Pakistan and North Korea built their own devices, and so, likely, did Israel, all after buying it stealing the technology), I think it’s unlikely this happened.
> If they [terrorists] use it, they achieve the attention and blood they seek, while the world doesn't know where they all live
Terrorists don’t want to instill fear, they want to instill fear in the pursuit of political aims. Because of that, they would have to tell the world they were responsible. I think the world would figure out where they live from that.
I agree with you that it’s unlikely terrorist groups are in possession of nuclear devices. It’s not a weapon that’s easily hidden (its radiation probably gives it away), and it’s expensive to obtain, and they wouldn’t have many, so losing one without using it would be a big loss.
Their size (you probably need a truck to move them) is more of a challenge. Nuclear weapons are well-shielded to not make handling them dangerous, therefore their radiation is barely noticeable. After all, that's the reason lost ones are so hard to locate. Put them in a metal crate or a container, and they should fade into the natural background radiation.
I don’t know about any shielding. They’re just plutonium and uranium, which aren’t very radioactive. They wouldn’t needlessly add weight to the weapon.
I don’t think that’s the case. Secretly having a bomb gives you the ability to strike hard, but on its own it doesn’t deter.
If you want to deter, it’s not sufficient to have teeth, you have to show them or at least convince your enemy to believe you have them, and that only seems to be happening by countries that built their own such as Russia, North Korea and Pakistan.
So, how would, say, Canada secretly having a bomb deter anybody from attacking it?
Also, the USA already provides non-nuclear allies with a way to deter by storing on-the-book weapons in their countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing) That doesn’t have to happen off the books.
Are you suggesting there are countries they trust enough to store nuclear bombs there, while they don’t want the world at large to know about that? I can’t think of any country that would qualify for that.
I was thinking about somewhere like Israel or Taiwan, that a sitting president might be willing to push the button to defend a nation, but not have confidence that their successor would do the same, and so put the matter in the hands of the nation itself.
Another possibility: intelligence agency has an unaccounted for nuclear weapon, particularly one made by another country, and holds onto it secretly in case they ever want to commit a false-flag terrorist attack with it. Such a bomb needn't be fully operational; a failed detonation might still achieve the desired effect.
Yep, Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears has a very similar premise. Israel loses a nuclear bomb during the Yom Kippur War, which is subsequently recovered by Palestinians who team up with some East Germans to start a war between America and the Soviet Union by blowing up Denver (the bomb fizzles.)
Yeah I agree. Clancy movie adaptations seem to have all been downhill since Hunt for Red October. Arguably his books too, although Red Storm Rising is still my favorite (and probably impossible to make a good movie of, the scope is too large and Russia too competent.)
I've long thought Red Storm Rising could have made a really good miniseries. You're right the scope is too big for a singular movie but maybe just right for a 6-10 hour series. It won't happen now though given Russia's recent displays of competence. The premise will be considered too outlandish. It would end up as believable as the Red Dawn remake or the one where the North Koreans shoot up the White House.
We'll find out soon. Apparently Trump scuttled the anti nuke deal with Iran on his way out of office, and they're enriching uranium again.
Tehran says they're planning to level New York City ASAP (within the year). Among other things, they're lobbying to be taken off a list of terrorist organizations.
It's a selection bias. In all the universes in which a nuclear war was triggered, we wouldn't be alive here today discussing it; we could only exist in a universe in which a nuclear holocaust didn't occur.
These seem like pretty reasonable ways for them to be lost. Though the headline suggestion did give me a scary thought: if we do end up on a trajectory of social collapse, most likely caused by ecosystem breakdown, then the resulting failed states could make it very easy for weapons such as these to get "lost".
> Some of these tests—particularly tests involving plutonium—did not vaporize the material in a nuclear blast. It remained in tunnels and containers, in forms that could be recovered and recycled into a bomb. In addition, the Soviet Union discarded equipment that included high-purity plutonium that would have provided materials and information that could lead to a relatively sophisticated nuclear device if it had been found.
> When scientists and military personnel withdrew from Kazakhstan following the collapse of the Soviet Union, they abandoned tunnels and bore holes filled with plutonium residue—enough plutonium, if fully reclaimed, for terrorists or a state to construct dozens of nuclear bombs. Between 1991 and 2012, scavengers looking for valuable metal and equipment from the former Soviet test site came within yards of the unguarded fissile material; in two cases the scavengers broke into the vessels used to contain some of the experiments, although there is no evidence that they removed any plutonium.
Yes, but they don't maintain efficacy for very long. The tritium bomb triggers have a short shelf-life.
The radioactive material could be used for dirty bombs, but if there's societal collapse, I don't think such a tactic would have much of a useful place for anyone.
I probably should have mentioned that the three I listed above aren't the three the headline is talking about. The three the article talks about were all assembled: one in Georgia (USA), one in Greenland, and one in the Philippine Sea.
Pakistan has a porous border with Afghanistan and thousands of its own armed extremists (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, Islamic State offshoots) who are frequently at odds with the government.
Who needs nukes? Ukraine is currently being pumped full of billions of dollars of conventional weaponry, and the Westerners responsible admit that they have no idea where most of it is going. In fact much of it is supposedly turning up on the darkweb markets - which is to say that it's now possible for anyone with bitcoin to buy a Stinger missile.
Think about that the next time you get on a plane.
I tend to lean towards "there's no way to make a reasonable estimate at all" given the lack of oversight, as reported by other mainstream news organizations.
Unfortunately many are blinded to reality by their zealotry on the issue. Others understand the truth, but believe statements of objective reality that don't "support the effort" should never be uttered because it hurts the cause or "echoes Russian propaganda". The truth is that the "fog of war" is a very real thing in every conflict and it is foolish to make definitive statements one way or the other.
Nobody knows Russian losses. Not even Russian officials (though they probably have best estimates, but they will not release the numbers, not until this operation is over). Everything you read in Russian news is Russian propaganda which lowers estimates. Everything you read in Western (or god save Ukrainian) news is anti-Russian propaganda which makes up numbers out of thin air, because West in active proxy war against Russia and its news agencies are just propaganda speakers on the other side.
Russian submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes is still very much a thing. The idea is to target US cities along the coastline. It neutralises any anti-ballistic missile defences the US has deployed.
> As it fell, one bomb deployed its parachute: a bad sign, as it meant the bomb was acting as if it had been deployed deliberately. It started flying through the seven-step sequence that would end in detonation. The last step involved a simple safety switch. When a military crew found the bomb, it was nose-down in the dirt, with its parachute caught in the tree, still whole. As the Orange County Register writes, that last switch was still turned to SAFE.
Perhaps you are saying the same thing arriving from different paths. OP didn't say why it was amazing they didn't detonate. Maybe they read the same article. Are you assuming that they think nukes just go boom in an explosion?
It is amazing they didn't detonate, given how far along in the arming sequence they seam to have been. It is not hard to conceive of something bumping that switch during the destruction of the plane ... world might be a very different place had that happened. US thought it was nuked (by the Soviets), launches attack, Soviets launch counter attack.
Should they have exploded? I was under the impression that to actually get the powerful chain reaction you have to spend a lot of energy bringing pieces of fuel together (to the point that explosives are used for that) otherwise they'd just melt and not explode.
It's quite hard to get a nuclear bomb to go boom. A lot of things have to happen in a carefully controlled and timed sequence. A big part of that is indeed forcing bits of fuel to stay together for long enough to allow the chain reaction to work its way through a significant proportion of the fuel.
Without the force you get various intensities of fizzle explosions and radiation bursts.
Hitting the ground with a "doink" after falling out of a plane is more likely to break something than trigger a full-scale explosion.
> I was under the impression that to actually get the powerful chain reaction you have to spend a lot of energy bringing pieces of fuel together (to the point that explosives are used for that) otherwise they'd just melt and not explode.
When it comes to the original fission weapons, you’d use a spherical arrangement of high explosives to force a carefully crafted, solid core to implode and achieve the critical mass (fat man) or you’d fire a gun with fissionable material as the bullet into a fissionable target that would achieve critical mass once the bullet whacked into it (little boy). Your description is super interesting because it sounds like maybe you were conflating the two. I can’t imagine the gun method really takes a lot of energy (more than a shotgun shell, but not much more?) but the high explosive arrangement for the spherical method was probably a scary, powerful work of art, in its way.
I expect with the more developed weapons, not to mention the hydrogen bombs, the warheads are quite sturdy and it’s the arming systems and fuses that prevent disaster. The bombs might sometimes be expected to hit the earth from a great height and then detonate, after all.
>into a fissionable target that would achieve critical mass once the bullet whacked into it [...] I can’t imagine the gun method really takes a lot of energy (more than a shotgun shell, but not much more?)
The gun type is mechanically simple, but impossible to scale up. If you're smacking two subcritical spheres together, each sphere can't be more than 15kg.¹
But wait, Little Boy used 64kg of uranium. How did it do that?
"Critical mass" is a function of mass and surface area. A sphere packs the most atoms together, a long skinny rod spreads them out. To increase the amount of uranium used and thus the explosive yield, Little Boy actually fired a 38.5kg cylinder onto a stationary 25.6kg plug. Each half of the pit would have been supercritical, if they were spherical.
Gun types also need to assemble quickly, since as soon as any part of the assembly reaches critical mass it will start blowing itself apart. It had 64kg of uranium but 2,300kg of neutron reflecting material and tamper, and the launching charge used 3.6 kilograms of cordite! That would be a hell of a shotgun shell.
---
¹: For pure U-233, which Little Boy didn't actually have, since it was only enriched to 80%. Wartime contingencies and all.
> Little Boy actually fired a 38.5kg cylinder onto a stationary 25.6kg plug. Each half of the pit would have been supercritical, if they were spherical.
I’d forgotten that, if I ever knew it. Super interesting.
> The bombs might sometimes be expected to hit the earth from a great height and then detonate, after all.
I'm under the impression that this is not how aircraft-carried nuclear bombs would be detonated. The Little Boy detonated at Hiroshima did so 580 meters from the ground.
Depends on the goal. Air burst optimizes for area of blast effect on the surface, ground burst is more effective against underground targets and causes way more fallout and contamination.
I believe the highest risk is that some unplanned external influence sets off the trigger mechanism. As you said, the nuclear core itself will not spontaneously explode from an impact, but there are surrounding explosives designed to mke the core achieve criticality - can we be sure they don't accomplish their goal unintentionally?
The activation of the explosives has to be precisely aligned, else it will just explode and distribute the nuclear material over the surrounding area. Events that happen on the scale of microseconds determine the success and final yield of the nuclear chain reaction. Therefore, an uncontrolled detonation of the explosions is likely to thwart the reaction from happening.
I‘m with you there, it‘s very unlikely. Still, it doesn’t feel comfortable when failing to successfully detonate might become the only thing preventing a nuclear disaster.
> to actually get the powerful chain reaction you have to spend a lot of energy bringing pieces of fuel together (to the point that explosives are used for that) otherwise they'd just melt and not explode.
This isn't really how it works because you are not "putting energy" into the system via explosives.. You are compressing a plutonium core to cause it to become "supercritical".
To your point, this is very difficult because if the explosive lenses are not perfectly timed, the core will not compress properly. This could cause anything from a total "fizzle" where the plutonium is spread over a large area due to "conventional explosives" to a yield far below expectations.
To get the "powerful chain reaction" you need to hold this compressed "supercritical" core together as long as possible, to consume the plutonium fuel.
This is challenging because the fission reactions increase at an exponential rate, so obviously it cant be held supercritical for long.
I'd be more surprised had they detonated. Unlike conventional bombs the actual assembly is very delicate and minor misalignments will render them inoperable. They could blow up because they contain explosives but won't produce fission.
Well, neither were fully armed armed - fortunately!
There were multiple arming points / switches. One bomb was ‘Safe’, and the other ‘Armed’ (but with an intermediate high voltage switch ‘off’). Bits of the latter one are still buried 150ft down, including nuclear material:
Beyond the terror factor, the book is a fantastic history of technological development, and how a system of systems evolved to cope with additional failure states. I think it's worth reading and thinking about for anyone working in a technical field.
Ditto for "Command and Control". Good read, very terrifying how much lack of control there was/is.
I can recommend "Raven Rock" as another good read. How very rational people and be totally irrational. Living near Raven Rock and Camp David for over 50 years, we always assumed that if the missiles started flying, we be toast in a nuclear wasteland.
“ Some incidents are so baffling, they almost sound made up. Perhaps one of the most extraordinary occurred when a training exercise on the USS Ticonderoga went badly wrong in 1965. An A4E Skyhawk was being rolled to a plane elevator, while loaded with a B-43 nuclear bomb. It was a disaster in slow-motion – the crew on deck quickly realised that the plane was about to fall off, and waved for the pilot to apply the brakes. Tragically, he didn't see them, and the young lieutenant, plane and weapon vanished into the Philippine Sea. They're still there to this day, under 16,000 ft (4,900 m) of water near a Japanese island.”
>The weapons remain there to this day, trapped in their rusting tomb. Some people think the weapons remain there to this day, trapped in their rusting tomb – though others believe they were eventually recovered.
On a related note, in college ca. 1999, when I took a history and philosophy of science course on nuclear weapons, the instructor, a retired Los Alamos physicist, assigned an excerpt from The Sum of All Fears as required reading.
He claimed it was — critical, probably deliberate technical inaccuracies notwithstanding — the best description of the process of detonating a nuclear weapon he was able to find in the open literature.
Amazing class, which also included a field trip to Oak Ridge, TN, where we got a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of the K-25 gaseous diffusion facility[1] while it was in the process of being decommissioned, and a far less interesting "tour" of the basically nonexistent public areas of the Y-12 weapons plant[2], where the only interesting things on display were the extensive security precautions.
Sorry for unrelated comment, just wanted to let you know that you’re either shadow banned or someone is on the mission to downvote all you comments to oblivion as all your recent comments are displayed as [dead] to me for no obvious reason except this one.
Lost, by a mile (or potentially being a product of faulty inventory to begin with). The logistics involving nuclear weaponry are so extreme and involve so many people that something getting lost is more likely than some kind of crime.
Do you think presidents can smuggle a nuclear warhead across borders with a donkey or something? Reagan couldn't even manage to sell weapons to fund a bunch of terrorists under the table.
> The logistics involving nuclear weaponry are so extreme and involve so many people that something getting lost is more likely than some kind of crime.
The logistics being so extreme and involving so many people is evidence against loss, not for it. Also, the US placing nukes in a place that only a few silent people are aware of is not a crime.
> Do you think presidents can smuggle a nuclear warhead across borders with a donkey or something?
Do you think they can lose them down the kitchen sink drain, or accidentally leave them in a cab?
Did you read how these were lost? So in your world an entire B-47 crew disappeared in 1956 just so Eisenhower could “launder” a pair of nuke cores (not entire bombs) to <waves hands> somebody.
Nobody from the B-47 crew has ever been heard from again, and nobody, anywhere saw the plane ever again.
And in your world this is more likely than a plane crashing in the Med?
Losing a bomb is pretty easy. It just requires a convergence of mistakes. Laundering it requires you make those mistakes happen and avoid anyone finding out you did it.
Atomic bombs are useful for blowing stuff up (which requires detonating them) or threatening to blow stuff up (which requires other people knowing you possess them). "Laundering" a bomb that remains unknown for 50 years doesn't seem that useful.
Seems prima facie easy, but at least in the USA each part is certainly contained within a different special access program, and never the twain shall meet.
I feel like the implication was clearly that it was done on the sly. Outright defecting to the other country is quite a bit different from being paid to look the other way.
I personally find this saying extremely overrated and damaging in many cases. Especially considering the pacifying effect it can have on attempting to undo certain injustices.
Best use of it is in your personal life with family, friends, retail worker in your local grocery shop etc.
I agree. My guess is that institutional malice is fully explained by economic incentives 99% of the time. Which the version from the other comment cover: "Never attribute to stupidity, that which can be adequately explained by economic incentives"
Would assume stolen by Russia or China… espionage to reverse engineer our tech to see if they could find flaws or exploits to reduce its effectiveness, or ideas to improve their own designs.
Makes me feel safer anyway since the bomb would be out of commission.
So these bombs, if found, they aren’t just pull the pin and chuck it to detonate, right? would they even pose a risk of found by a civilian?
I don't think the basic Pu-239 / U-235 cores themselves degrade, those isotopes have extremely long half lives, but other components of the bombs certainly do.
Particularly, the tritium used in boosted nuclear weapons has a half life of just over 12 years. Furthermore all Pu-239 cores have some Pu-240 contamination that undergoes spontaneous fission, the neutron flux from which probably degrades other components of the bomb over time.
I think a 50 year old "lost" bomb would be a radiological hazard at most. Nuclear weapons require upkeep.
After 50 years, only 6% of tritium remains from the initial 100%. Any weapon using tritium (boosted fission bombs and hydrogen bombs) would likely fail to work.
Chemical explosives that initiate nuclear detonation also degrade. Successful weapon function requires an extremely precise initial chemical explosion, not likely to be possible with a 50 year old bomb.
> The exact details are hazy, but the broad contours are clear: the inspection team found the control of the forward-based nuclear weapons inadequate and possibly illegal. In Germany and Turkey they viewed scenes that were particularly distressing. On the runway stood a German (or Turkish) quick-reaction alert airplane (QRA) loaded with nuclear weapons and with a foreign pilot in the cockpit. The QRA airplane was ready to take off at the earliest warning, and the nuclear weapons were fully operational. The only evidence of U.S. control was a lonely 18-year-old sentry armed with a carbine and standing on the tarmac. When the sentry at the German airfield was asked how he intended to maintain control of the nuclear weapons should the pilot suddenly decide to scramble (either through personal caprice or through an order from the German command circumventing U.S. command), the sentry replied that he would shoot the pilot; Agnew directed him to shoot the bomb.
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html
The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were a wild time. Tens of thousands of deadly devices in the hands of two superpowers armed to the teeth, and not a single rogue general. Not one single device sold to terrorists on the black market. It's a miracle we made it out alive.