I was just reading about how the U.S. wanted to possibly replace old, aging nukes with newer ones. This was in Scientific American in April of 2007.

Some guys said that the bombs would still work after 100 years.

I was only about 2/3 through the first page when the thought occurred to me, "Could an old nuclear bomb from the 70's spontaneously blow up?"

I remember an episode of MacGyver from the first season in which he and a friend dealt with old cases of dynamite that were leaking nitroglycerin. The nitroglycerin looked like clear hair gel. When a single drop was thrown to the ground, that small amount caused a potentially harmful explosion. Pretty serious stuff.

I was wondering about medical trials for new drugs. You test some people for a few months or years, and then say, "Well, I guess this drug is ok." Then 80 years later it turns out it causes cancer. Like cigarettes! Everyone was smoking back in the 50's, and no one was really aware of the long term harm it could cause.

So it all makes me wonder if there are long term dangers that can build up over time, with respect to aging nuclear weapons, and if there is no way we could possibly prepare for them. Like what if there's an as yet undiscovered state that the radioactive material could reach which would result in a random atomic detonation?

If this were possible, every aging bomb in existence would be at risk, and we've got thousands, right?

I remember just a few years ago I started wondering why we no longer seemed afraid of nuclear war. I had seen videos depicting the fear shared by members of my parent generation a few decades ago. I figured, "Well, the threat isn't that big a deal anymore." But then I wondered, if we still have the technology, there's still a threat. Sure, foreign countries aren't really in the news all that much (this was a few years ago, mind you) as being threatening in a nuclear sense, but that could change. Every time I heard another country became a nuclear power, I felt like one of the geeky kids cheated his way into the popular clique. "India has The Bomb? What in the world happened?"

The media wasn't really mentioning nuclear war as a major issue. Movies depicted end times scenarios, but that was about it. We focused on "lesser" battles, non-nuclear confrontations. And slowly, steadily, various nations began acquiring nuclear technology without any mainstream naysayer. Now, it seems, we may have reached a crystallization point. Enough countries have gone nuclear that there is an even greater threat to the world in general than when everybody lived in fear.

World War III is sometimes thought of as a dragged-out nuclear conflict. On the contrary. Nuclear weapons will greatly speed things up. If we ever do reach the point of a full-scale nuclear war with our neighbors, it will probably last less than 48 hours.