Former Crypto-Analyst Analyzes the Danger of Nuclear Weapon Stockpiles

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that noted encryption pioneer Prof. Martin Hellman has a new passion; estimating the risk of our current nuclear weapons policies. His web site, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, asks the question, 'How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, no one seems to know.' Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.' The web site and a related statement therefore urgently call for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct his startling conclusion. The statement has been signed by seven notable individuals including former NSA Director Adm. Bobby R. Inman and two Nobel Laureates."

misleading summary

[aleph42 (1082389)]

I find the summary misleading. I thought the risk analysis was about incidents with nuclear weapons when at peace, but he only calculates the risks of all out nuclear war.

While it's an interseting number it's not a useful one to take a decision, since one of the sad premise of today's war strategy is that, since others have the nuclear weapon, you must have it too. No one is going to dump his nuke stocks because he might have to use them some days.

It's like doing an article summary saying "having a gun in your room is dangerous", when it really means "a gunfight is something that might happen".

I would have been more interested by numbers about the effects of an all out nuclear war. The only ones I can remember are that a US president was told (during the cold war) that scenarios predicted 300 million american death *at best* in a *winned* nuclear war against Russia. The second one ( which I'm not sure about) is that, at the peak of the number of nukes between US and Russia, they could have "destroyed the earth 52 times" (killed everything on it? phisically shatter?).

Does anyone have more details concerning these numbers?

Re:misleading summary

[QuantumG (50515)]

The only ones I can remember are that a US president was told (during the cold war) that scenarios predicted 300 million american death *at best* in a *winned* nuclear war against Russia.

That'd be a neat trick.

United States -- Population: 301,139,947 (July 2007 est.)

Re:

[aleph42 (1082389)]

Ooookay. My bad for quoting from memory.

My source is a TV documentary on a missile crisis during the cold war; very serious as far as I could tell. (It was about a time when reflection of sunlight on some clouds had caused the "missile incoming" alarm in Russia to go off).

Since I obvoiously misremembered the number, I can only say that it was huge (I'm sure about the act it was millions, and ny second guess is it was 100 mil or so). The president, who had received that analysis just after he was elected, d

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

Well, to be fair, it makes as much sense as having enough weapons to destroy the Earth 56 times. :)

Re:misleading summary

[gnick (1211984)]

Well, to be fair, it makes as much sense as having enough weapons to destroy the Earth 56 times.

I'm personally of the opinion that way too much $$$ goes into maintaining the size of the stockpile that we have. But, the massive size isn't as ludicrous as it might sound. The point of having too many weapons isn't so that you can wipe out huge regions multiple times - Just the opposite. By having a large range of nuclear capabilities, you can hit small strategic targets or large targets as necessary while minimizing "splash". If all we had was huge city-killers that could kill the earth once, we'd have to kill huge regions just to hit small hardened targets. But, we have city killers and (relatively) small target killers. Of course, just how small we can design them is restricted by international treaty to make sure that we're not tempted to deploy except in dire need.

Re:misleading summary

[Cairnarvon (901868)]

The point of having a stockpile of nuclear weapons isn't to use it, it's *only* to act as a detterent. There's no nuclear weapon small enough that it won't seriously impact innocent civilians, unless you're targetting tiny islands in the Pacific.

Re:misleading summary

[gnick (1211984)]

I mostly agree. Nuclear war would be abysmal and should be avoided at (nearly) any cost. But, your deterrent is only as good as your ability.

If Elbonia possesses a single nuclear weapon strong enough to destroy the entire planet, other countries would assume that they could molest Elbonia quite a bit before pushing them far enough to employ their nuclear 'arsenal'. Even small-scale nuclear attacks may go unresponded.

But, if Elbonia possesses a large selection of tiny nukes that could target arbitrary targets globally with minimal side effects, that would be a reasonable deterrent to keep other nations from harassing Elbonia . Nations would refrain from nuking Elbonia for fear that Elbonia would actually respond in kind.

Basically, you have to be able to convince the world that you *could* use your arsenal and *would* use your arsenal if you had to. It's a disgusting situation, but it's reality for now.

And, the stockpile isn't *just* to have a deterrent. It's mainly for use as a deterrent and, gods-willing, it will never be needed for anything else. But, if we were nuked, it would become a horrible but possibly necessary actual selection of weaponry... If we were to ever set some idiotic policy such as "we would never deploy nuclear weapons for any reason", we would no longer have a deterrent and would be inviting attack.

Re:

[smaddox (928261)]

Weapons of this size actually have very significant fallout. The reason it is only 10 tons is because of a lack of efficiency. Most of the nuclear material is not fissioned, and so it stays in the air.

Re:

[zippthorne (748122)]

I suppose that could be the reason, but a far more compelling reason is redundancy. Of course that presumes competence in the decision makers, but the argument goes like this:

You don't ever want a nuclear weapon to go off where you don't want it to go off. If it blows up in the factory, or gets launched and blows up over the enemy you didn't actually have yet, it's very bad for you. i.e. you want it to have an extremely low false-positive rate. So you optimize the design for failure.

But when you do need

Re:

[aleph42 (1082389)]

If you count "killing everyone on earth" as destroying it, then it's probably accurate.

I often saw on article about meteors that it wouldn't take much to fill the atmosphere with enough dust (for years) to kill most plants thus most life.

Actually some weeks ago I searched for some time on wikipedia for the effect of nukes and weather their combined power could physically destroy earth. But I quit after having to go on the page about sugar to get an idea of how much energy was in 10^10... :)

Re:

[JosKarith (757063)]

Well, if you're going to go around nuking volcanos you may as well fill them with alien dissidents and criminals first...

Re:

[smallfries (601545)]

Although the OP has already said above that he was quoting from memory and the number is probably wrong - it would be a neat trick. At the height of the cold war "winning" was defined as having more of your population survive than the other side. This was also the criteria that the Indians were using to claim they could "win" a war against Pakistan if Kashmir ever went hot.

Depending on how long you run the stats for it is not impossible that that percentage of the US would have been wiped out in a full-scal

Re:

[dasunt (249686)]

There's some speculation that nuclear winter wouldn't have happened -- the models that predicted it are relatively simplistic, especially by modern standards, and considering that the majority of the bombs will be airbursts.

OTOH, who is going to argue that a nuclear war is safe? It's like the statistics that there are enough weapons to destroy the earth x times over. Bullshit. The dinokiller astroid was 100 million megatons. At the peak, the nuclear weapon stockpile was .02 million megatons. At the

Re:

[vertinox (846076)]

It's like doing an article summary saying "having a gun in your room is dangerous", when it really means "a gunfight is something that might happen".

If you mean that by if your gun misfires and then an automated system kicks in putting all your guns into auto-sentry mode shooting everything that moves which also causes your neighbors sentry guns to start shooting causing a chain reaction with your neighbors then by what you mean... Yes.

The key thing about a nuclear weapon mishap is that there is the chance

Re:misleading summary

[Dun Malg (230075)]

Imagine if you would a nuclear storage facility in Russia which during a routine disposal of a weapon something goes horribly wrong and it goes off

Imagine throwing a pile of bricks and a bucket of mortar in the air and having them come down fully assembled into a perfect patio barbecue. That's about the likelihood of your scenario. Setting off nukes isn't like lighting a fuse on a stick of dynamite. It requires very precise timing, a virtually simultaneous detonation of the high explosives surrounding the warhead. An accidental detonation would be highly asymmetrical and merely result in the immediate area being peppered with fragments of plutonium.

Re:

[Diagoras (859063)]

http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/82cab/index.html [uow.edu.au]

Useful analysis of the effects of a nuclear war.

Overkill is a myth.

Biggest problem is nuclear winter

[Britz (170620)]

It used to be (in the 50s) that scientists predicted the survival of human civilisation in Africa and Australia after a nuclear war.

After the 60s pretty much everyone predicted (maybe they now predict, if they didn't factor in the dust problem, but calculated with nuclear stockpiles ready somewhere around the 1960s) the end of life as we know it if there was a nuclear war.

The reason is pretty simple. Because of the large detonations a lot of dust would be thrown into the air. It would be so much and would b

RTFA

[Britz (170620)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter [wikipedia.org]

I didn't put the link there for fun. Here is an interesting part:

2007 study on global nuclear war

A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in July 2007[3], Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences[4], used current climate models to look at the consequences of a global nuclear war involving most or all of the world's current nuclear arsenals (which the authors described as being

Re:misleading summary

[aleph42 (1082389)]

I agree that the MAD strategy sounds stupid, but the fact is that it seems to work.

An optimistic view of MAD would be that countries accessing to nukes are forced to act in a "mature" way: to preserve the statu-quo and limit the power struggles to cold wars (through proxy states like Viet-nam, or through economical, and now "cyber" warfare).

A pesimistic view would be that with thechnology ever rising (*), it becomes easier and easier to get the nuke; and once an unstabble country gets it, any coup can land a nuke to some weirdo. We already had one country (Pakistan?) selling nuclear tech to pretty much anybody (they blamed it on one guy when it got known).

(*): For example, the missile itself is an important part of the potential danger (think Cuba), and right now for smaller bazooka like missiles, a PS2 is enough do the guidance system.

As for the forcefield: the US are supposely building an anti-missile shield (hit-to-kill missiles), but it's really not working that well. And at the beggining of the cold war it would have been a _very_ risked bet.

(btw, thanks for commenting on the sig! You inserted some code in your comment, but I was thinking more along the line of a grammar tree to hide the instructions in some normal-looking text ^^ )

And he is qualified how?

[Lawrence_Bird (67278)]

Basis of his 'estimates'? Access to SIOP? Access to any other data, either physical or strategic of our, our allies or our 'adversaries' nuclear weapons/plans? Oh.. zero? By all means lets trumpet his 'work' outside his area of training as authoritative, complete with requisite frightening headlines.

Re:And he is qualified how?

[AaxelB (1034884)]

Well, since he's a well-known crypto-analyst, my guess is that he's incredibly paranoid and vastly overestimates any chance of catastrophe. So... I guess that makes him qualified to make scaremongrish claims, in a strange way.

Re:And he is qualified how?

[capnkr (1153623)]

I'd rather be in a home surrounded by nuke plants than by coal/oil plants, anyway.

During peacetime, things would be much cleaner in my environment.

And, if the missiles ever really start flying, I would be assured of a quick ticket outta here, before having to live in a screwed up world full of nuclear winter.

Besides - power plants used to be targeted anyway, I'd bet - *regardless* of what source/type of fuel they used.

Mod story "boring and pointless fearmongering (again)"...

Here's how he's qualified

[nbauman (624611)]

To answer those who say, "What does some guy who invented an algorithm know about nuclear war," (1) IEEE Spectrum checked Hellman's claims with 2 reliable, independent experts and (2) A long list of people who do know about nuclear war signed on to his claims. You might take seriously the former director of the CIA, the former president's science advisor, 2 Nobel laureates, and the (Republican) former head of the FDA.

(But that is a reasonable question -- you get points for skepticism.)

This teaches 2 related lessons about journalism and science:

(1) There are 2 kinds of publications in the world -- those that check their facts and those that don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. This is why some obscure guy publishing a blog can be more reliable than most major newspapers and TV stations. (Or in this case, why IEEE Spectrum is more reliable than most daily newspapers.)

(2) There are 2 kinds of scientists in the world -- those who gather a consensus of experts before going public, and those who don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. (This is why that story recently about cell phones causing brain cancer by an Australian neurologist was complete bullshit.) Hellman is competent enough in science to know that.

According to TFA http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6099 [ieee.org]

Hellman's method isn't unfamiliar to those trying to gauge the risk of failure for complex systems, such as nuclear reactors. IEEE Spectrum asked J. Wesley Hines, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, to examine Hellman's methods, which were detailed in the appendix of the Bent article. "I only read the appendix but feel his argument is rational and also feel his methods are justified," says Hines. "Some could argue with the numbers he used, but he does give logical reasons for using those numbers and admits that they have large uncertainties since the events have been rare in the past."

Robert N. Charette, who runs the risk-management consultancy ITABHI and is a regular contributor to IEEE Spectrum, agrees with Hines. However, he says Hellman should have also turned the analysis on its head. "The other side of the risk equation is, suppose you get rid of nuclear weapons. Does that increase the probability of war? Pretending there aren't any nukes, how many wars would we have had?"

And the signers http://nuclearrisk.org/statement.php [nuclearrisk.org]

The above statement has been endorsed by the following Charter Signers:*
Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics; see also Nobel Announcement
Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board, Verisign Inc.
Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President's Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board; see also NY Times article
Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director NSA and Deputy Director CIA
Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University
Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of FDA
Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics; see also Nobel Announcement

(BTW, here's a tip for any student. You used to be able to get a student membership in the IEEE, which includes a subscription to Spectrum and another (expensive) IEEE magazine of your choice, for some ridiculously low amount like $12 a year. It's a great deal for the magazines alone, although IEEE membership has even better benefits that most students don't even know about.)

it's a very long way from encryption algorithms

[petes_PoV (912422)]

Just because this guy invented (or part-invented) an encryption technique, he is not necessarily an expert in any other field - no matter how much of a celebtrity he may be.

While he may have "woken up" to the threat of nuclear weapons, and can use his established reputation to help reduce the threat they pose, he is certainly not an expert and his opinions (for that is all they are) carry no greater weight than yours or mine.

Beware of celebreties with a cause.

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

Dude who has shown he is good with math, does some math, news at 11.

Re:it's a very long way from encryption algorithms

[tomtomtom777 (1148633)]

Just because this guy invented (or part-invented) an encryption technique, he is not necessarily an expert in any other field - no matter how much of a celebtrity he may be.

Just because this guy invented an encryption technique, doesn't mean he less capable of studying the risks than some nuclear expert. At a first glance, he doesn't seem to claim anything outrageous.

Beware of "celebrities" with a cause, but not necessarily more or less then "experts" with a cause

Re:

[CrimsonAvenger (580665)]

and can use his established reputation to help reduce the threat they pose,

Which "established reputation" is that? Fact is, 99.9% of America has never heard of him, and will never hear of him without wondering "who the hell is this guy?".

This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....

Re:it's a very long way from encryption algorithms

[nbauman (624611)]

This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....

You picked a poor metaphor. The guy who did the obituaries in the New York Times was Theodore Bernstein, who is most distinguished for arguing at an editorial conference before the imminent Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion that the Times had an obligation to print what they knew about the invasion, which would have scuttled the invasion. (That was the journalistic equivalent of the engineer's pre-flight conference before the Challenger disaster.) That invasion led to the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cuban missile nuclear showdown, which was as close as we've ever come to destroying the world.

Bernstein was accused of left-wing sympathies during the days of the blacklist, and as a result, the Times busted him down to the obituary page. Back in those days, we had a social contract that, if you committed yourself to a corporation, they would give you a job for life, so instead of firing people who were drunk or incompetent, the Times would just assign them to the obituary page. Unlike everyone else, Bernstein revolutionized the obituary page by writing serious obituaries.

Bernstein also wrote a textbook about copy-editing called Headlines and Deadlines, which is still used in journalism schools. The main point of that book, BTW, was that copy editors should check the facts of a story, and make sure it gets all sides. If the Times had followed that advice, they would have avoided some recent humiliations. So Bernstein got the last laugh again.

thousands of nuclear plants

[Peter La Casse (3992)]

'How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, no one seems to know.' Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants'

That's reassuring, because it seems unlikely that my home will ever be surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.

"Thousands of nuclear plants"?

[argent (18001)]

Would it be better if my home was surrounded by thousands of oil refineries instead?

Oh, whoops, I'm in Houston, it probably is.

Re:"Thousands of nuclear plants"?

[The_Wilschon (782534)]

Just be glad they aren't NUCLEAR oil refineries!

April 2008 Sci Am article

[Kupfernigk (1190345)]

There is an article in April Scientific American which exposes the twin facts that no screening currently exists that can detect significant amounts of weapons grade Uranium being brought into the US or Europe in shipping containers, and that the amount of weapons grade U on the loose is enough to make home made kiloton weapons possible. Although the article only cites public data, there are an awful lot of physicists and engineers about who could design a simple low yield nuclear device given access to eno

Re:

[aleph42 (1082389)]

I really agree with your post as a whole, and I think it is a shame that current systems discourage leaders to take decisions that are good only in the long term.

But there is a small factual point I don't understand: how would the KGB using polonium was a warning? Everyone knows that Russia has nukes! (and polonium).

Apart from that, you seem to say that the author of that article was on the no-fly list. How did he get off it? Judging from what I heard of this list, that was no small feat.

You assume it was the "KGB"

[Kupfernigk (1190345)]

I prefer to assume that it was a criminal gang, on the basis that the officials of the KGB and its successor are not stupid. If a Russian mafia organisation has access to significant quantities of radioactives and the necessary laboratory facilities, this is a demonstration that they could potentially build a bomb, and transport bomb making materials on civil aircraft and around London. If the real KGB wanted to kill somebody, I am sure they could do it far more easily and less traceably, without causing a

Re:April 2008 Sci Am article

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``Our desire for cheap international trade based around largely uninspected shipping containers exposes us to an enormous risk.''

The counter point to this is that while, indeed, the system is far from secure, things seem to be going alright.

I find this is the key difference between Real World security and computer security. In computer security, weaknesses, once known, _will_ be exploited on a massive scale. In the Real World, things are often far less grave. This explains both why so few people get computer security right (applying a Real World "it will be ok" attitude to computer security is a mistake), and why I think people should just relax and not worry so much about, for example, terrorists blowing up airplanes.

Security should, at least in my opinion, always be a cost-benefit trade-off. More severe security measures can reduce the risk of a disastrous security breach, but security measures incur their own cost, which you pay every day, even if no security breach is even attempted. The trick is finding the right balance.

Of course, it isn't a very comfortable idea that you or your friends might be blown up anytime, or get ruined by identity fraud, but I'd honestly rather live with that idea than to spend my life locked up in my house, afraid to go out because the bus might be blown up, and afraid to order anything online because my credit card data could be stolen...and _still_ run the risk to get killed in an earthquake.

Junk Science

[tsotha (720379)]

Real scientists should shun these kinds of people. This guy has a completely unverifiable model and feeds garbage information into it. He's trying to predict the likelihood of deterrence failing. But it's never failed, so he has no data to go off of. Not only has it never failed, when we think deterrence has been close to failing, we have no way of knowing how close. There's simply no way to assign probabilities to complex chains of events involving humans.

There's nothing to be learned from a model li

Re:Junk Science

[vrmlguy (120854)]

Real scientists should shun engineers who warn about. This guy has a completely unverifiable model and feeds garbage information into it. He's trying to predict the likelihood of deterrence failing. But it's never failed, so he has no data to go off of. Not only has it never failed, when we think deterrence has been close to failing, we have no way of knowing how close.

By that logic, on the morning January 28, 1986, NASA's management was right to ignore the engineers warning that the Space Shuttle Challenger might explode. Those guys also had an unverifiable model: A shuttle had never failed, so they had no data to go off of. Not only had it never failed, they had no way of knowing how close it had ever come to failing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster [wikipedia.org]

The new Library of Congress-like unit for danger

[4D6963 (933028)]

and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.'

So if one of these nuclear power plants exploded (that's the risk being talked about here?), how large would the crater be, expressed in Libraries of Congress? Also, how likely would such an event be, expressed in chances of successfully dropping a penny from the top of the Empire State Building into someone's pocket?

Re:The new Library of Congress-like unit for dange

[CrimsonAvenger (580665)]

So if one of these nuclear power plants exploded

The only way to make a nuclear power plant explode is to fill it with dynamite and light the fuse - the fissionables have zero chance of exploding.

The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....

Re:

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

The only way to make a nuclear power plant explode is to fill it with dynamite and light the fuse

The Chernobyl plant exploded, and the biggest fear during the TMI incident was of an explosion. Explosions can include chemical and/or pressure driven events, not just fission chain reactions.

The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....

That's patently false, especially if you consider the risks of sabotage or terrorist attacks, which are probably higher than the risk of technical failure. Shit happens.

Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Ch

Well then I feel pretty safe....

[isa-kuruption (317695)]

If having all these nuclear weapons is "equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.", then I feel pretty safe... I mean, despite all the hype around "nuclear disasters" at these power plants, they have proven very safe when managed properly. Most nuclear plants have been running in the U.S. and France for more than 30 years without issues.

But I doubt this is where Mr Hellman was coming from. Instead, he was using the hype of the nuclear power plants being bad and dange

Begetting another question

[Peaker (72084)]

Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.

Which begets the question: How risky is it to have thousands of nuclear power plants around your home?

My subscription finally pays off

[vrmlguy (120854)]

I got inducted as a Tau Bate in college, when I was studying EE. A lifetime subscription to 'The Bent' was one of the two biggest benefits (the other being the special ring that gets you free sodas from vending machines).

The Bent usually has great cover articles. Sometimes you get an article of the multi-cnetury history of global position determination, sometimes an explaination of the LIGO project. On rare occasion, you get a Libertarian discussing how things could be changed for the better in modern Am

Oh no!

[danwesnor (896499)]

Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.'

I can't think of one plausible reason why all the nuclear power plants in the world would come down here and surround my house. I doubt if I have anything they want, and wouldn't even know what to offer them. Do you suppose they drink sweet tea?

Re:

[mspohr (589790)]

I think Heisenberg could explain it.

'Crypto-analyst'? Come on, editors

[Logic and Reason (952833)]

The word is 'cryptanalyst', not 'crypto-analyst'. And Hellman is a cryptographer (or cryptologist), not a cryptanalyst. Cryptographers create encryption schemes; cryptanalysts break them.

John McPhee

[giminy (94188)]

For another (older but still very relevant) look at this and related issues (such as what to do with the plutonium by-product of power generating reactors), look no further than John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy. It's an extraordinarily interesting issue that will only become more pressing as time goes on. Unfortunately, it isn't as widely reported on as it used to be, which I suspect is due to political/embarrassment reasons...

Re:Thousands of nuclear plants...

[Rosco P. Coltrane (209368)]

...which are managed by a monkey and operated by people with a god complex.

You might find this [wikipedia.org] refreshing then.

Quite frankly, I reckon even if these (carefully screened) individuals who control the nuclear arsenal were trigger-happy, they'd quickly rethink their situation when they realize they have the destiny of the world in their hands. Yes, even the chief monkey in the White House.

Re:Thousands of nuclear plants...

[gnick (1211984)]

I work very close to the issue at hand and can testify to seeing major gaps in the "careful screening" that goes into clearing the persons responsible. And it's distressing - Minor security incidents that clearly implicate cleared individuals go largely uninvestigated (petty theft, etc.) But, on a bright note, there's so much redundancy and security-bureaucracy that the security environment for special nuclear material or critical weapons components is actually very good (if rather expensive).

Re:Thousands of nuclear plants...

[MicktheMech (697533)]

Yeah, the comparison seems to have more to do with the safety of nuclear power plants than the danger of nuclear weapons. Don't get me wrong, Nuclear power plants create a large potential hazard, but with the systems in place now they're a lot less dangerous than people perceive them to be.