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Nukes are also not very stable long-term Their fissile payload is radioactive after all, and as it decays it becomes harder and harder to achieve prompt criticality.


They're more stable in the sense that it takes active effort to move them to the exploded state, while chemical explosives need active efforts to keep them unexploded.


I was using "stable" in the "shelf stable" sense rather than the "chemically stable" sense. I can see how that is ambiguous in this context.




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