[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.

[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.