306
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
306 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
468 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
These are known as "Broken Arrow" incidents, and at least 32 have been officially recognized by the government. Some of them were accidental releases of the bombs, others were plane (or other vehicle) crashes that contained bombs. There's likely more that haven't been recognized by the government. almost all of them happened between 1950 and 1980. Now that the cold war has died down, we haven't been moving around our nuclear warheads as often and so haven't had a new one. At least, not an official new one.
It's pretty hard to have an accidental detonation at this point, though. Prompt criticality is tricky to achieve and easy to deliberately not achieve. Word is the newest bombs require a specific electronic sequence of fuse activations that's stored encrypted, and would require being a superpower to reproduce, so it's actually impossible to set them off as designed even if one was stolen.
Good info thanks for adding on!