2022 was a harrowing year in a long line of harrowing years. A brutal war in Europe raised the prospect of nuclear war as the leaders behind the invasion rattled sabers and made thinly veiled threats to use weapons of mass destruction. And all this as we’re still working our way through the fallout of a global pandemic.
Those hot-headed threats raise an interesting question, however. Decades have passed since either Russia or the United States ran a live nuclear weapons test. Given that, would the nukes even work if they were fired in anger?
Check and Test
The Trinity nuclear test was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, but sadly not the last. Credit: USDE, public domain
If there’s one thing engineers like to do, it’s to test things. It’s all well and good to draw something up on paper or put it together in the lab. But until you’ve switched it on and made it do its thing, it’s hard to know if it’s going to act as expected.
The problem with nuclear weapons is that testing them is a nasty business. It tends to leave giant craters in the landscape, and pumps radioactive dust into the atmosphere to spread over neighbouring populations. For this reason, most countries signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned all nuclear weapons testing save for that done underground. This later expanded into the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, formed in 1996, that nevertheless has never officially come into effect due to several holdout states.
Treaty or no treaty, nuclear weapons tests have become exceedingly ra ..
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