Schrödinger’s Arsenal

Quantum Ambiguity and Ontological Risk in Nuclear Stockpiles

Despite the rigorous expertise of nuclear engineers and the sophisticated controls surrounding nuclear arsenals, there remains a fundamental ontic vagueness—a real, irreducible uncertainty—about the exact state of any given nuclear warhead at any point in time.

Nuclear warheads are not static objects. They are complex assemblies of fissile material, high explosives, neutron initiators, and sophisticated electronic controls—all of which age, degrade, and interact in unpredictable ways. Plutonium, for instance, undergoes radioactive decay that alters its metallurgical structure. High-explosive lenses can crystalize or delaminate. Neutron sources decay. Even storage conditions, such as temperature fluctuations, humidity, and background radiation, contribute to long-term changes whose full effects are not completely knowable.

While these systems are designed with redundancy and safeguards, the possibility remains that unknown interactions—especially over decades—could produce outcomes outside the design envelope. This is where ontic vagueness enters: even with perfect data and instrumentation, some properties of the warhead’s internal state are ontologically indeterminate, not just epistemically unknown. The complexity and quantum nature of some components, combined with aging and environmental flux, preclude complete certainty.

Furthermore, external cosmic or solar events, such as a sufficiently intense coronal mass ejection (CME) or solar flare, could induce currents or electromagnetic pulses in storage and command systems, potentially overriding fail-safes or causing cascading failures. While designs strive to account for such risks through hardening and shielding, no system is perfectly insulated from unknown or unprecedented phenomena.

In short, while the intentional detonation of a nuclear device is tightly controlled, the idea that such a device is perfectly inert while in storage is a comforting illusion. It is more accurate to say that a nuclear weapon in storage is a metastable object—deeply constrained, yet never wholly passive—whose full behavior over time remains, at some level, unknowable

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