Alternate History What if the Atomic bombs that were accidentally dropped in the US had actually exploded

[Sailor.X]

We know back during the Cold War a few nuclear weapons were accidentally dropped in the US. List of military nuclear accidents - Wikipedia

What would have been the Political and Social fallout if those weapons had cooked off a full yield in the Continental US. How would this had affected the US Military transportation of Nukes and the view of Nukes in both Washington and the country at large? What would have been the international reaction? For the purposes of this debate every accident that happened in the USSR also goes off at full yield.

 

[Lightershoulders]

Well, this means that safety procedures and the safeties built in do not work as they should work, and can not be guaranteed to work.

This leads to a lot of reasonable fear.

 

[Doomsought]

Unless it is a gun type, a small explosion and some burning uranium.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

We know back during the Cold War a few nuclear weapons were accidentally dropped in the US. List of military nuclear accidents - Wikipedia

What would have been the Political and Social fallout if those weapons had cooked off a full yield in the Continental US. How would this had affected the US Military transportation of Nukes and the view of Nukes in both Washington and the country at large? What would have been the international reaction? For the purposes of this debate every accident that happened in the USSR also goes off at full yield.

Do you mean, "If, in an alternate universe, American nukes were handled with less caution than historically, such that a full yield accidental detonation is made possible and then actually occurs.", or do you mean, "Despite precautions that should have made it physically impossible, full yield accidental detonations nonetheless occur"?

Because the primary outcome of 1) would be that after the first such incident, there's a massive revamping of nuclear safety and handling protocols to make another incident impossible, but the primary outcome of 2) is "a lot of nuclear scientists are urgently tasked with figuring out what the hell is wrong with our understanding of nuclear physics."

 

[Husky_Khan]

If we play it smart it would speed up the end of World War Two and completely prevent the Cold War, ending it in preemptive Communist surrender.

Stalin: We have atomic bomb now. You give us Germany or we nuke your Capitol.
USA: *nukes own Capitol* Your move Joey...
Stalin:

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

I dun geddit.

 

[Francis Urquhart]

It's something Dr. Norman Friedman (one of the world's leading experts on this sort of thing) said when presenting a paper on flexible response at the USAF Academy. Flexible response (dumb idea by the way) was based around the concept that each side would let off nukes on a tit-for-tat basis until somebody cried uncle (said it was a dumb idea). So, Dr. Friedman proposed, we needed a target system that, if adopted, would confer a major military advantage to the United States, would great increase the efficiency of our war effort and enhance the power of our diplomatic presence while giving no option for an equivalent response from the opposition. There was only one solution to that requirement.

(Profound silence)

The answer is to laydown 350 kilotons anywhere inside the Washington Beltway. It achieves all the above but the Soviets cannot psychologically make the only possible response (nuking Moscow).

Dr. Friedman was carried out of the lecture theater shoulder-high by cheering students.

On the subject matter, several nuclear devices that were lost in accidents have exploded. In the nuclear weapons business, "explosion" and "exploded" refer to situations where the conventional explosives surrounding the "pit" (the physics package at the center of the device) go off but they do not start the chain reactions in the pit. The pit going off, resulting in a nuclear fireball is an initiation. (The technical difference is that normal explosives going off is a chemical process in which a small volume of cold explosive becomes a large volume of superheated gas. A pit initiating is a physical change at the atomic level which releases massive mounts of energy. If you like, we can go into that in more detail). the combined process is usually referred to as a detonation or a NUDET for short.

We've had several cases of where the explosion of the conventional layers cause a partial initiation of the core. This is called a "fizzle" and is generally speaking a disappointment. Usually, the yield is three or four tons. The highest non-nuclear fizzle I can remember offhand was about 30 tons. This is way short of the 150 - 350 kilotons that we normally regarded as desirable. Most of the Nork tests have been fizzles; one so much so that there was a lot of doubt whether there was actually an initiation component at all.