Popcorn Nukes

The New Scientist magazine, on 26th June 2008, has an article about the possibility of nuclear bombs going off by accident. It says,

You might think nuclear weapons have been carefully designed not to go off by accident. Yet more than 1700 of them have design flaws that could conceivably cause multiple warheads to explode one after another – an effect known as "popcorning" - according to a UK Ministry of Defence safety manual.

However, a nuclear-weapons safety manual drawn up by the MoD's internal nuclear-weapons regulator argues that this standard single-point design might not be enough to prevent popcorning.

Stefan Michalowski, a senior scientist at the OECD in Paris, France, who researched warhead safety at Stanford University in California in the 1990s, is concerned about the risks of an extreme event such as a firefight with direct gunshots. "The explosion of a boatload of missiles in a port would be an unimaginable catastrophe," he says. "It's a very, very scary thought."

A spokeswoman for the MoD told New Scientist that although it is "a theoretical possibility", popcorning is "a scenario that is not credible".