I asked this question on a USS Cole thread, but didn’t get much of a bite.
Can modern weapons be detonated by exposure to outside influence? That is, can the bombs or missiles explode even if the weapon is not “armed” or fired from whatever is supposed to fire it? If one were to walk over and swiftly kick a cruise missile, would it – shall we say – kick back?
I ask because I read that the attack on the USS Cole could have been much worse if the explosion had happened either forward or astern of it’s actual location. It could have detonated weapons magazines. Would the Tomahawks have gone off and leveled Aden? Could a tactical nuke (if Cole had one) gone off with its full nuclear yield? How dangerous are modern warships when they’re not actually engaged in combat?
Making the USS Cole look like the USS Maine could be interesting, but I doubt it’s too realistic. We’ve come a long way from black powder and iron weapons. It takes a lot to detonate modern explosives, mere shaking or even sharp hits couldn’t have done it. So kicking a cruise missile wouldn’t do much. I wouldn’t want to try and shoot at it, but that might not even work.
No. It takes a very precise, measured detonation to make all the subcritical pieces of fissile material into one intensly supercritical mass (Subcritical means that a free neutron, if it split an atom, could not create a sustained chain reaction. Criticality is the bare minimum density required to create a sustained chain reaction and thereby a nuclear explosion. Supercritical is more dense than critical, meaning that more and more violent chain reactions can form and be sustained, leading to a bigger, more efficient blast.) meaning that the worst you could imagine realistically is that small fragments of radioactive material would shower Aden and the harbor. Still not pretty.
I’ll second Derleth – modern weapons have sophisticated fire/safe mechanisms and modern explosives are designed to withstand shock and heat effects. You probably could fire a bullet at most modern munitions and the biggest safety concern would be the ricochet.
Nuclear weapons, in particular, will not fire unless a complex sequence of events occurs. If you disrupt that sequence at any point you get no nuclear chain reaction. The worst case would be to detonate the chemical explosives that are used to compress the nuclear fuel. If that’s not precisely controlled you would get an explosion that would scatter the radioactive material, but still a nuclear explosion is unlikely.
I’m not saying that there is no danger whatsoever of accidental detonation of nuclear or other warheads – just that the armed forces recognize that most weapons spend most of their lives in transit or storage. Making them operate correctly (i.e. NOT going off) during that phase is every bit as important as making them go off when they’re supposed to. They have stringent requirements about what they have to survive.
In general ammunition on board a ship is pretty stable.
Think back to WWII. Most ships were sunk by having the snot knocked out of them (lots of hits and eventually enough holes to sink it). Through all of that, fires and everything, they rarely exploded.
That’s not to say it never happened. I recall seeing some old WWII footage of a ship being attacked from the air. One second the ship is sailing along, the next it just blows-up…ALL of it.
Another famous example is the German battleship Bismark sinking the H.M.S. Hood (pride of the British navy till that point). On the Bismark’s fifth shot they hit the aft magazine of the Hood causing it to break in two and sink in about two minutes. Of 1,000 plus sailors on board the Hood only 3 survived.
Given the absolute devastation a magazine explosion can have on a ship they are obviously carefully protected (actually I think this was a weakness in the Hood with thin deck armor) and, I would imagine, use relatively stable explosives. Getting hammered by a missile would produce a sustantial shockwave through the ship. You can’t have your ammunition going off under these conditions considering that, as a war ship, such things may be expected to happen.
However, set a bomb off in a magazine (as happened to the Hood) and it’s probably all over for that ship.
So, in answer to the OP, I’d say that the ammo on a navy ship is quite resistant to kicking–maybe even a sledgehammer. However, as someone else pointed out, I would not want to shoot it.
No, but they carry Tomahawks, which can have a nuclear payload. So while they currently don’t, they could. I will quote later from the book I have, The Yard, the story about how the class of destroyers the Cole is in are made at the Bath Iron Works in Maine.
In December of 1975, The USS Belknap, A 500 foot long destroyer type ship ran under the angle deck of an aircraft carrier and sheared off its entire superstructure. The 3.5 inch ammo magazine exploded in the ensueing fire, but the hull remained seaworthy. The hulk was towed back to the US, rebuilt and recommisioned.
Ship design has come a long way since the Maine and the Hood, but had the Cole lost a magazine, it probably would have sunk, since the hull was already breached by the terrorist bomb.