Nuke warheads could explode ‘like popcorn’

The manual, seen by the New Scientist, says that warheads should be capable of resisting multiple simultaneous impacts, which ‘would contribute to the prevention of popcorning and should be a design objective’.

The safety manual argues that the present standard single-point design might not be enough to prevent ‘popcorning’, the British daily said.

The London-based newspaper quoted a Defence Ministry spokesman as saying that popcorning was only ‘a theoretical possibility’ and in fact it was ‘a scenario that is not credible’.

However, experts say an accident could still take place. Stefan Michalowski, a senior scientist at the OECD in Paris, who researched warhead safety in the 1990s, is concerned about the risks of an extreme event such as a firefight with direct gunshots.

The Financial Times of London earlier this month reported that the US was unable to locate hundreds of sensitive nuclear missile components in Pentagon’s inventory.

A US probe found that nuclear missile nose cones were inadvertently shiped to Taiwan. These events have raised concerns about nuclear safeguards, particularly in the light of the troubling revelation that an US air force bomber flew across the country with six nuclear warheads onboard without any security checks.