Ironically, compared to — say — landmines, nuclear weapons are very “safe” by design. Many things need to be triggered “just so” to blow one up even conventionally, let alone as a proper nuclear weapon.
For example, they use only insensitive explosives. The trigger is purely electric and needs a lot of power.
Just pull the battery and it’s a solid inert lump.
Also the plutonium “physics package” is less radioactive than you would think. It’s safe to handle with just gloves for short periods.
If you banged on a modern nuclear weapon for an hour with a 2 kg hammer, you'd have a sore arm. Soak it in warm water and take an aspirin.
If you sawed into one with a metal cutting saw, it would just quietly turn itself into a brick.
Nuclear weapons are designed to be both tough and delicate (meaning: they like to brick themselves) at the same time. An extraordinary amount of clever engineering across decades has made them this way.
Disagree on the just part. A metal cutting saw into plutonium wouldn't exactly be good for your health. So long as it sits there as a sphere it's not going to hurt you, but it's way down there on the periodic table where basically everything is pretty toxic. You do not want to inhale the dust!
Reminds me of this quote from XKCD What If?
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
> “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
I'm curious why they don't add a second, conventional, explosive to the device that detonates a few seconds later and destroys the primary trigger system and makes it less likely that anything will detonate later in case of a malfunction of the primary trigger.
Think of nuclear bomb design as the direct inverse of landmine design. With the latter you want it to blow up under a wide range of circumstances, including if it is "tampered" with. You want sensitivity, within some wide range.
A significant concern with nuclear weapons is that they're small enough to steal.
You definitely do not want thieves or terrorists to be able to trigger a nuke.
So the trigger systems for nuclear weapons are encrypted and require a decryption key to be functional.
A key requirement for a successful (nuclear) detonation is nanosecond-level timing control of the explosion. Anything else will result in a fizzle with the conventional explosives just scattering the nuclear material in a small area.
It's possible that some nukes had deliberate self-destruct modes where the circuitry would react to tampering by triggering an asymmetric explosion, causing a fizzle, which is relatively harmless to city-sized targets.
We still don't have the whole story, maybe the whole story isn't even known.
But an anti-tamper destruct is a reasonable explanation for the K-129 incident.
These days it's easy enough for a bomb to fry it's electronics to brick it, but that was before electronics were so easy to fry.
Yes, what I mean is that the anti-tampering self-destruct mode could also be activated after the main device is triggered. That way, if the main device does not detonate, at least you know it will never detonate on its own (since all of the circuitry has been destroyed).