[j9461701]

A sympathetic detonation is very unlikely for a nuclear weapon. They have to detonate in an extremely specific way, such that the explosion compresses the fissile material from all sides at once. A random off-center explosion hitting a nuclear bomb would likely cause the explosives in the bomb to detonate off their very specific timing and fail to cause a nuclear detonation.

This was actually a safety design feature:

> Walske also stipulated that all nuclear weapons in the stockpile must be “one-point safe;” that is,the weapon must have a probability of less than one in one million of producing a nuclear detonation if a detonation of the high explosives originates from a single point

In fact this entire article seems to not recognize this fact. Even if one of the bombs detonated, it was always going to be bad for the people near it but not catastrophic or anything. It would almost certainly not have been nuclear.

[evo]

I disagree; under normal circumstances regarding the HE explosives you are 100% correct but I suspect a nuclear shockwave at near point blank range might be fast enough to push the near side of the primary pit to the far side in a time interval short enough to cause an additional criticality. Probably not to design yields, but plausible.

[j9461701]

A nuclear chain reaction takes place roughly over a single microsecond. To travel the ~11 inches of a bomb, in ideal circumstances, a high explosive needs roughly 200 microseconds. It is not impossible that the exact right stuff could happen to trigger the bomb, but it is extremely unlikely - it took the smartest minds in america working together for 3 years to figure out the exact precise timing to prevent a nuclear fizzle and achieve a true atomic explosion. It is, contrary to pop culture, near-impossible to pull off by dumb luck. Mostly you'll just make a radioactive mess.

[evo]

Right! But that's talking about compressing a plutonium pit in atmospheric pressure--being an extremely dense metal, plutonium will preferentially "squirt out" in any direction rather than compress, if there's a direction it can go in. Therefore, you need to make a spherical shockwave via explosives.

But that's in 1 atm! The initial wavefront of a fission device is going to be conservatively about 4 inches a microsecond (based on early above-ground test photos, modern high-yield devices would probably be faster still). This could very well turn the entire physics package of the secondary weapon into a thin pancake on the blast front, the plutonium can't get out of the way fast enough to avoid compression. This is a totally different scenario than a one-point-safety fizzle. The HE explosives in the second bomb might as well not exist relative to the overpressures faced from the first bomb's detonation.

[pletnes]

Another point is the massive neutron flux, which will get some nuclear reaction out of the bomb material in and of itself. Neutrons will set off both fission and fusion reactions, simultaneously.

[arethuza]

I wonder if you had two bombs in a confined space whether the X-ray flux from one would cause a radiation flux driven implosion in the other - similar to how the primary causes the secondary to implode in an H-bomb.

Almost certainly not!

[mannykannot]

I was thinking the same, given that Teller, Sakharov et. al. came up with, but discarded as unworkable, several designs (the "Classical Super", the "Layer Cake"...) before they discovered that, unfortunately, there was a way to make it work. My guess is that the X-ray pulse from a buried bomb would be quickly absorbed (it is quite rapidly attenuated just by air), and that whatever X-rays reached the second bomb would all be from one direction, ruining the symmetry that is apparently needed for fusion ignition.

On the other hand, I have heard that a non-trivial part of the yield of a hydrogen bomb comes from the fast neutrons from the fusion causing a much more complete fissioning of the fissile material. Maybe, if the buried bomb was not damaged to the point where it was incapable of fusion ignition, the second bomb would contribute to the explosion in this way, without acting as a hydrogen bomb itself. With a high enough neutron flux from the first bomb, maybe the core of the second one would not have to undergo implosion, or even stay intact.

The article also talks about a 17-mile kill zone, and the creation of a new "North Carolina bay" despite the crash being 50 miles from Pamlico Sound. These seem to me to be incompatible claims, and surely the second, at least, must be hyperbole?

https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/The-fir...

Richard Rhodes, "Dark Sun."

[arethuza]

"non-trivial part of the yield of a hydrogen bomb comes from the fast neutrons"

I believe in almost all "H-bomb" designs most of the energy produced comes from the fissioning of various uranium components by those neutrons (mainly the "pusher" surrounding the secondary and sometimes the surrounding case enclosing the primary and secondary - e.g. in the W88).