Shocking are the many accidents involving nuclear weapons over the past half century. Nevertheless, no nuclear weapon has ever gone off accidentally. How (often) did the world escape disaster again and again?
In 1958, a B-47 bomber burns down on an American base in Morocco. There are some nuclear weapons on board, but they withstand the heavy fire.
Three years later, in 1961, a B-52 breaks into pieces over the US state of North Carolina. From a great height, two hydrogen bombs fall into the meadow, they crash down unharmed.
Nearly twenty years later, in 1980, an engineer at a military base in Arkansas undetected causes a leak in the fuel tank of a nuclear missile. The next day the missile explodes, but the warhead remains intact.
These are just a handful of incidents mentioned in the book Command and Control by the American journalist Eric Schlosser. It seems that the world has crawled through the eye of the needle several times.
Sico van der Meer, researcher at the Clingendael Institute in the field of nuclear weapons proliferation, says he is always shocked when he hears about new incidents. “But unfortunately it is nothing new, we see such events continuously over the years. Especially because scientists and journalists keep diving into old and open government archives; there are really no official statistics on this.”
History of the bomb
The list of incidents is long, but it actually always went more or less well. The weapons' nuclear charge has not ignited in any of the known cases. A miracle? Or maybe easy to explain? To understand this better, we cannot avoid a lesson in nuclear weapons technology.
The nuclear bomb was first developed in the colossal Manhattan project during World War II. The Americans threw billions of dollars and more than a hundred thousand employees at it to be the first to get hold of a nuclear weapon. Ultimately, this led to two types of nuclear bombs that were tested in 1945.
In both weapons, a certain amount of uranium or plutonium is compressed using powerful (conventional) explosives, starting a nuclear chain reaction. Ultimately, a small amount of mass is converted into energy. Via the famous formula E =mc 2 it can be calculated that in this way less than a gram of matter was needed to wipe the Japanese city of Hiroshima off the map in 1945. That happened with a nuclear weapon known in English as a gun barrel type of weapon. It is the 'simplest' nuclear bomb that can be made. This involves firing a piece of enriched uranium propelled by a high-velocity explosion into another piece of uranium. It resembles the way a bullet is fired, hence the name 'gun barrel' (pistol barrel).
The second type of weapon uses plutonium as fuel for the uncontrolled nuclear reaction. However, the way to reach the critical mass of this nuclear fuel differs. The plutonium is not fired through a barrel but is contained in a sphere surrounded by explosives. By igniting these explosives with very precise timing, the plutonium is compressed from all directions, starting the nuclear reaction.
And then there's the hydrogen bomb:the heaviest bomb ever made. It is possibly even more complex. It uses a nuclear weapon described above to in turn power a nuclear fusion reaction, resulting in an even bigger explosion.
Perhaps apart from the first type of nuclear bombs, properly detonating a hydrogen bomb in any case requires a very accurately timed sequence of events. Even if part of the explosives were to go off accidentally in that case, this would not result in the feared and all-destroying nuclear reaction.
Safety Mechanisms:The Essential Switch
In addition, modern nuclear weapons are equipped with various safety systems that prevent them from going off accidentally. "You can assume that every bomb requires at least two activation codes to 'arm' it, so that a bunch of crazy generals have no chance of detonating a nuclear weapon themselves," says Van der Meer. A primitive version of this so-called Permissive Action Links system (PAL) made its appearance in the 1960s, but has become increasingly sophisticated since the 1980s.
“That was completely different with the first generation of nuclear weapons,” says Arend Meerburg, who spent many years working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on matters such as nuclear disarmament and the control of nuclear and chemical weapons. “In the 1950s, nuclear weapons were hardly protected, and besides, every commander could actually shoot such a thing…”
In the movie Dr. Strangelove or:How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb from 1964, a crazy general tries to provoke a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union.
But besides the fact that PAL has made it virtually impossible to fire a nuclear weapon on your own, there are a lot of other systems to prevent it from going off accidentally; even in the event of a major fire or accident. For example, modern nuclear weapons have sensors on board that only activate it if an acceleration curve is detected that exactly corresponds to the launch of the weapon. A weapon in a shed cannot be detonated in this way.
Furthermore, the detonator is separated from the explosives via a number of so-called weak and strong left, which are deliberately broken in the event of an accident. Finally, nuclear weapons contain conventional explosives that can withstand the heat of a kerosene fire and the nuclear payload is protected by a fire-resistant shell.
Do all these measures ensure 100 percent safe nuclear weapons? “Military will argue that it is,” says Van der Meer, “but of course you can never fully confirm that. The chance of a nuclear weapon accidentally going off is very small, but the consequences would be enormous. Books like Command &Control show that there have been quite a few 'near disasters' over time."
These disaster scenarios include, for example, the explosion of explosives in the event of a major fire. The chance that the nuclear charge of a nuclear weapon will go off in this way is very small, but what can arise in this way is a so-called dirty bomb. As a result, (part of) the radioactive load ends up in the environment and can cause damage there. That's also something terrorists might try to create in the rather unlikely event that they get their hands on a nuclear weapon; a dirty explosion. Van der Meer:"Terrorists simply do not have the codes and resources to detonate modern nuclear weapons."
Nuclear bombs in the Netherlands
Nuclear bombs have probably become increasingly safer on average, thinks Van der Meer. However, it is not so much the latest weapons that we should be concerned about, but especially the older generations. “Of course there are stocks that are quite old. The aircraft bombs that are probably at Volkel Air Base are in any case older nuclear weapons, the design of which dates back to the 1960s. Formally, we don't know anything about those bombs, but you can speculate that they don't have the very latest security mechanisms."
Van der Meer:“Peace movements have long been calling for us to give them back to the United States, just like Greece, for example, did. Apparently our government still finds it useful to keep them in the Netherlands. It might create a kind of extra close alliance, giving back the nuclear weapons now that they are no longer needed could also be seen as an insult to the Americans in some respect. In addition, they can be 'used' in negotiations with the Russians to reduce the number of nuclear weapons there as well. Politically, it is a complex issue.”
Van der Meer and Meerburg are not the most concerned about Western nuclear weapons, they are probably protected as well as possible. Van der Meer:“But countries such as North Korea, which we know develop nuclear weapons, are not aware of this. I suspect they haven't invested as much in security there as other countries. But this continues to speculate, in fact there are few things in the world as secret as nuclear weapons technology.”
Get rid of the masses of nuclear weapons
Barack Obama pledged to fight for a world without nuclear weapons when he took office as US president. According to Meerburg, that is easier said than done. “For example, there are factories and labs that benefit from maintaining the nuclear arsenal. Especially because so much money goes into it. Obama promised disarmament, but the fact is that tens of billions of euros are still going to it.”
Meerburg finds the most important fact that the missiles that are now on the so-called high alert stand disappearing. “There are hundreds. Rockets that can be launched almost immediately. For example, if something technically goes wrong with the Russians, causing them to accidentally launch something, the US almost automatically retaliates. In this way we have a kind of doomsday machine built and that is very bad. I think there is far too little interest in that.”
Van der Meer is also in favor of the elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world. “In total we are talking about no less than 18,000 nuclear warheads, of which two countries have 97 percent possession. The United States and Russia have the capacity to destroy the world several times over. And besides the fact that nuclear weapons are dangerous and cost a lot of money in terms of maintenance, they are actually not deployable at all. The idea that you want to destroy an entire city is in a way outdated. With targeted (conventional) weapons, it is now very easy to eliminate some dangerous individuals. In that regard, I see the parallel with chemical weapons that everyone has agreed for a long time that they should be eradicated.”