Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability - Part 1
Why Hacker News recommends it
Strongly recommended in nuclear-accident and weapons-history threads as an excellent documentary on how nuclear weapons were made safe and secure.
What it is
Part one of Sandia National Labs' first-person documentary on the use control, detonation safety and survivability of US nuclear weapons. It covers nuclear sharing in NATO and how control of use was separated from possession, leading to the always/never problem.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec crmd · 2024-12 · on “The Albuquerque "Broken Arrow" Nuclear Accident”
For any engineer interested in nuclear weapons, I highly recommend this three-part series produced by Sandia National Laboratory on their development of Permissive Action Link, the warhead’s electrical isolation and cryptological module that ensures US nuclear weapons will detonate if any only if authorized by the President. It’s fascinating how they thought about bad path scenarios like thermal damage causing carbon tracking of PCBs potentially defeating the control system. It is called “Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability” Part 1: [this video] Part 2: [LINK] Part 3: [LINK]
Recommends generuso · 2026-05 · on “Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored”
There is an excellent three part documentary from Sandia National Labs: "Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability." (part 1) [this video] They cover both the technology itself and its history, including the incidents you are reading about. These people are the ones who developed the methodology and the technology for nuclear device safety, or at least a significant chunk of it. I think it has recently become much more mathematically heavy, with zero knowledge proofs and other fancy stuff used to talk to the locks in the devices.
Cites Mindless2112 · 2021-01 · on “Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell on North Carolina”
> "Always/Never" shares the story of the national labs’ history of work for the safety and security of nuclear weapons. [this video]