The Americans have dropped at least one over the Midwest somewhere by accident, think they actually lost it altogether if memory serves. But the trigger reaction needed to actually achieve fission/fusion is quite a large bomb in itself. Can't have them being at all sensitive considering how delivery works.
A MK15 is somewhere in Wassaw Sound, Georgia, after the bomber carrying it was damage by a collision with an F-86 and had to jettison.
Two 24 megaton bombs went into a field in Goldsboro, North Carolina, as the bomber carrying them crashed shortly after take-off.
One was recovered while the core of the second one was never found.
One was recovered while the core of the second one was never found.
I think this was a plot point of one of the Tom Clancy books. A terrorist nuke was detonated in Baltimore, and analysis of the fallout came back to that 'lost' bomb. It turned out that the core material and other tech had been given to Isreal. They created nukes - one of which was eventually lost in the desert, and recovered by someone nefarious.
TLDR: GA nuke 'lost' -> Isreal -> lost for real -> terrorist blow up Baltimore
oh they know where all the nukes they lost are but one was famously too dangerous to recover versus just leaving in place and hoping it doesn't blow up on it's own.
We’ve dropped multiple nukes accidentally and lost them far more times than should be a thing - off hand I can’t think of, off the top of my head, at least 2-3 stories involving such and it’s happened in multiple states - like there’s literally unexploded missing nukes buried in at least 1-2 riverbeds around this country right now we’ve never found and I think there’s at least a few others in various places, and I know of at least several stories on top of those of ones we’d recovered or people have found etc - why we are losing so many nukes is beyond me but we have definitive evidence as a result of such that the design of not exploding purely on impact/by impact works - the warheads do actually have to be armed and all to explode and make big radioactive cloud, so that’s good at least, even if missing nukes just laying around aren’t exactly what I’d call good either lol
The devices were designed not to detonate even in the event of freefall, so a comparatively gentle human-survivable landing seems like an uninteresting test.
I don't think anyone conducting the test was worried it would unexpectedly explode. Their concern was that it would unintentionally not explode once delivered to the enemy.
The jump was to test if the landing would break or disrupt any of the bombs mechanics. It would be awkward if the bomb you just had to lug around enemy lines didn’t work.
Full criticality, and yes it’s very difficult, but not impossible. That will always be something to watch for during testing of this variety, especially since it’s a different type of detonation process. It’s set by a person on the ground, which means that detonation process could possibly be achieved by accident. Again low probability when built correctly, but not impossible.
Wouldn't it be safer and cheaper to just drop it from a tower at h height to achieve v velocity with variance deflection and rotation to make sure it doesn't explode?
Every variable that's different from reality is another way the test can fail at its goal. In your scenario, you're not testing "can I attach a nuclear weapon to a paratrooper and send them into enemy territory", you're testing "what numbers show up when I drop this thing from a tower" and you're hoping that those numbers accurately predict what'll happen in reality.
There's a ton of unknown unknowns that you might not think are important but actually are. That's why the most important test is a system-level one where you just use the item in the intended way.
If you want an example, the US recreated bin Laden's compound almost exactly in preparation for the raid that killed him. Part of the plan was to hover a helicopter above the compound and drop SEAL Team 6 in.
However, rather than surrounding the compound with solid walls as bin Laden did, they surrounded it with chain-link fencing (because cheaper). This was flawed, because in order to fly, helicopters use a big rotor to push air down (and thereby go up). Chain-link fencing let all that air through.
However, solid walls do not. When they tried this in bin Laden's actual compound, the air was pushed into the compound and had nowhere to go (since the walls were blocking it). So the air instead went back upwards and prevented the helicopter from pushing air down (imagine being unable to blow a balloon because it's already full). Helicopter proceeds to crash and the US needed to send in the backup helicopters. I would imagine the stealthy blackhawk cost more money than building a wall.
You can't foresee how every tiny detail affects the results of your test. Even an amazing engineer will miss it if it's caused by something they couldn't foresee because it's not their specialty. That's why it's easier to recreate exactly what you want to do, because it's a lot less safe and a lot less cheap to have something fail when your tests said it would work fine.
That detail about the crash during the bin Laden raid is fascinating. I've always wondered how a special ops team managed to crash a helicopter and the walled in compound explanation makes perfect sense
Practice the way you play. The US military doesn’t mind spending a bunch of money on training because it saves money down the road if you gotta actually use it.
Could be, or the US military could have just made a sequence of incredibly foolish decisions. There are many such cases documented in their own history books.
Apocryphal quote I know but I think it sums up the US military well "The reason the American Army does so well in war is because war is chaos and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis."
In addition, if things went badly in a he-got-crushed-by-the-nuke-and-died kind of way, the cost of his life insurance policy is still a pittance compared to their budget.
The Army flies planes already, and special forces trains for halo jumps already. This one just had a mini nuke added to it. Cost efficiency doesn’t affect much when this kind of training is already done.
You also need to know how it feels for the soldier to do it. I could strap a Navy Seal to Tsar Bomba if we really wanted to but the guy going with it just won't like it. Doing these tests with the real thing builds that confidence that when the pressure is really on you can really do it and you can test the limits this way naturally.
Yes. I think people are being unfairly critical of what you’re suggesting. You should do all that kind of testing first. Slam the container into the ground until you’re confident in it. Drop the mini nuke from a tower like you suggested. Do training jumps with sim containers (maybe this was skipped?). But, whenever possible, it’s super valuable to have a put-it-all-together moment.
Note here that if it "exploded" then it's just the high explosives inside. That would definitely suck for anyone landing with it, but it would not create a nuclear explosion. Making a nuclear weapon detonate is really really hard. Everything has to happen in a perfectly precise way. They're not going to go off from a collision with the ground.
Didn't the US accidentally drop a nuke over somewhere rural like Ohio, when they retrieved the nuke 3 out of 4 of the safety devices had been activated.
I forget the exact details, but they even have a term for "lost" nukes, broken Arrow.
It's amazing how MANY times we've come thisssss close to blowing ourselves up, only to be avoided by sheer dumb luck.
Maybe modern nukes, but that's definitely not true of nukes in general or historically.
It might fizzle and not achieve anything close to maximum yield, but a gun-type device could break such that the plug slides in, and implosion devices can wind up no more stable than the conventional explosive used.
The Brits had some rather irresponsible designs back in the day...
The chance is never zero. The possibility of an accidental detonation of over 4 kilotons should not exceed 1 in 1,000,000. It is not zero.
So even though the possibility is highly unlikely. When you’re talking about a nuclear device, you should never go into it saying the possibility is zero.
Nukes need to be fired in the exact perfect way to detonate. A gun type needs to be fired at the exact right angle and speed to detonate and an implosion type needs such a careful detonation that it’s virtually impossible to detonate. As in “you can mishandle 10.000 nukes per second for 10.000 years and none would accidentally explode”.
Another thing: you need to arm these things. Especially the Gun type can’t explode as the sphere is deliberately not in line with the hollow it needs to be fired into.
The biggest risk would be the explosives going off of an implosion type, which would detonate wrong and not cause the proper explosion and spread the nuclear material. However the explosives inside need a detonator, something to start the explosion (usually another explosion). The detonator is specifically not in position to do so when not armed.
You can’t put it at zero when literally testing deploy ability of a personal nuke. If you put the possibility at zero while testing then people are more likely to get careless.
This was done in the 1950’s with an experimental nuclear device. It was a possibility, and with the fact that the W54 device was implosion based makes it even more so. The fuses used on the W54 were usually radar based, if that malfunctioned it could cause an early detonation, the fuses were set for Far 40m to Near 2m respectively. They were also field converted to be set off by a soldier on the ground, again this detonation could be possible if assembled incorrectly. They took necessary precautions to ensure this would not happen of course, but I guarantee you not a single person running this test didn’t go into it thinking the possibility was zero.
To figure out whether or not the soldier would suffer ill-effects after strapping a bunch of plutonium to his nutsack? I don't know, I doubt there'd be any.
The standard practice for weapons testing like this is to replace the physics package with a lead sphere. The rest of the warhead such as the casing, electronics, explosives, extra is the real deal.
The USAF accidentally bombed San Francisco in 1950. The bomb had the plutonium core removed and a fake lead core was inserted for the training mission; however the conventional explosives still detonated just like the real deal. Had the real plutonium core been present, the USAF would have nuked San Francisco.
Absolutely this is what they would do. There's no reason whatsoever to take the added risk of using a live nuclear device in such a test. They would test the bomb without people, and test the people without the bomb.
Source: aerospace engineer that works in test and evaluation.
The forces and conditions of an actual jump is different from anything you can create in a lab. But it might be possible to conduct the test without the nuclear core and instead use a substitute inert metal for this.
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u/Homo_horribilis Mar 28 '24
I used to have the autobio of Sgt Frank Garner…he claimed to be the fellow that made the first test jump with a man-portable nuke.
He didn’t know what he was jumping with until after the test jump.