I wonder how long a nuke in storage lasts - ie, how much work does it take to maintain a stockpile of x nukes, and if you can turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily.
I think it’s shorter than you would imagine. I recall an episode of the podcast Arms Control Wonk talking about the nukes in possession of Ukraine during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Professor Lewis stated that those warheads likely had a service life of 5-10 years. But that may be specific to those Soviet warheads, and I think that different components need to be replaced at different intervals.
Russia's nuclear stockpile -- at least the strategic warheads -- have all been built anew since the end of the Cold War. The US is also modernizing its stockpile in the same way, but it has not finished yet.
"built anew": made with all new components except that the fissile material is recycled from an old Cold-War-era warhead. (They probably re-cast and re-machine the fissile material.)
The reader might be asking, How can Russia, a poor country, afford that? Well, nukes aren't that expensive once you have the fissile material and the design and manufacturing expertise and infrastructure. The pay for the soldiers to guard the nukes and constantly be on the ready to launch them is more expensive, according to one report I saw recently (and Russia has low personnel costs).
So this varies depending on what kind of nuclear weapon is and the delivery system.
The major deterrant is the LGM-30G Minuteman III [1]. Most of our rockets use liquid propellants. Since the alert window is under 10 minutes, you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.
There's a whole team responsible for maintaining the boosters and warheads of this first line of defense [2].
But there are a variety of other systems. Some dropped by strategic bombers, others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey), nuclear weapons deployed on submarines and so on. Also you have a mix of types. AFAIK the US was moved away from highly-enriched uranium weapons in favor of plutonium. Or at least, HEU reactors have shut down. Maybe there's a sufficient stockpile? Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear so you have to worry about the production and storage of tritium. IIRC a lot of tritium is a byproduct of plutonium production.
Maintaining a significant nuclear arsenal is actually really complex and expensive.
> you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.
You absolutely can! The Soviet doctrine was to use storable liquid propellants in their ICBMs - typically unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) as the fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidiser. I don’t know if they need the fuel/oxidiser replaced periodically but that combination is storable for over a decade.
The US went with solid rockets as they are more reliable - no turbines or valves etc - at the expense of performance, but the US perfected making large solid rockets before the USSR. The USSR however perfected oxidiser-rich staged combustion which extracted a lot more performance.
Storable liquid propellants are still used on satellites and deep space missions that need to perform large course corrections during their missions.
Forgive me if you meant all of your comment historically.
> Most of our rockets use liquid propellants.
Which ones? As far as I know the US only has solid fuel nuclear armed missiles. The Minuteman and the Trident.
> others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey),
The US only has aircraft dropped bombs in Europe. The US retired their nuclear capable rockets and cruise missiles under the INF treaty in 1988. They retired their nuclear artillery etc at the end of the Cold War.
The (liquid fuelled) Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey in 1962 after the Cuban missile crisis, in exchange for the USSR removing their nukes from Cuba, though there are still US nukes in Turkey.
> Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear
> Since the alert window is under 10 minutes, you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.
Huh? The Titan II was developed to do precisely that and worked that way for decades, they were liquid-fuelled and kept fuelled in their silos.
Liquid propellants are generally less stable than solid fuel. I had read in multiple places (from reputable sources) that you generally couldn’t keep liquid missiles permanently fueled like that. The propellants are extremely corrosive and dangerous.
But you are right that the Titan II is liquid fueled and was kept permanently fueled in the silo. I’m not entirely sure how to resolve those two facts. The Wikipedia page about the Titan II does mention multiple accidents and fatalities related to propellant leaks, so I’m guessing that they were just more risky to operate?
The main problem with traditional liquid fuelled rockets is keeping the propellant cold. It’s not feasible to keep a rocket with liquid oxygen fuelled for long periods. The Titan missiles use hypergolic fuel which is more storable, but also extremely toxic and volatile. More than 50 people have been killed in accidents involving this rocket.
There was an incident where a technician dropped a large socket down a silo that impacted the side of a Titan missile and set off a chain of events that ended in an explosion that nearly detonated a nuclear bomb on US soil.
The Damascus Incident[0]. There's a book called Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser that details the incident, and a PBS based on the book about it.
I was hoping this book would be a recommended. It really, really focused, reinforced is really not the right word to use here, my views on nuclear weapons.
It helps if you think of liquid-fueled rockets relying on cryogenics as something entirely different than those using hypergolics. Cryogenics can't sit there for a long time but hypergolics can.
The plutonium in bombs is essentially "super high grade" reactor fuel. Even degraded after decades in storage it is still far, far better than what is typically used. It just needs to be converted into the MOX (metal oxide) fuel pellets and then used in a reactor, pretty much as-is.
While many supercomputers were funded by stockpile stewardship, the goal was to produce high performance computers capable of a wide range of simulation needs.
One good example would be NERSC at LBL- it's unclassified research only, and their series of supercomputers were never intended to simulate ageing nuclear weapons.
Hard to say exactly what goes on in the classified supercomputers, but they certainly weren't spending much of their time simulating aging nuclear weapons- that was the ostensible reason.
It takes quite a bit of work to maintain nuclear warheads. All active US weapons contain plutonium 239, which has a half life of 24,100 years. It's radioactive by alpha decay, which leads to changes in the material properties due to energetic collisions and the buildup of microscopic helium bubbles (alpha particles are merely ionized helium nuclei, so stopped alpha particles become helium). Since the US stopped testing actual nuclear warheads in the early 1990s, it takes a great deal of indirect theoretical and experimental evidence to make sure that nuclear warheads are reliable without live fire tests. That's part of "stockpile stewardship." [1] If the plutonium has deviated too far from its original mechanical behavior, it would need to be removed from warheads, purified, and remanufactured into replacements that match the original specs. And again, the rebuilt components need to be reliable but they can't actually be tested via explosion.
US weapons also rely on tritium gas "boosting" to operate reliably and efficiently [2], and tritium decays with only a 12.3 year half life. The gas reservoirs of weapons need their tritium replaced at significantly shorter intervals. Even manufacturing enough tritium to maintain the stockpile has become a challenge because the US has retired its Cold War era weapons-material reactors that used to operate at Hanford and Savannah River. Currently the US uses a power reactor owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority to make tritium for weapons [3].
It's possible to make nuclear weapons (even thermonuclear weapons) with only uranium 235 for fissile material and no stored tritium. Such weapons could last a much longer time without active maintenance, since U-235 decays thousands of times slower than Pu-239. However, they would be larger and heavier for the same explosive yield, which complicates delivery. They would also lose certain safety features. Finally, without being able to perform full scale tests, it is doubtful that the US would have the confidence to replace its current high-maintenance weapons stockpile with a new generation of low-maintenance weapons.
I really wonder what the state of Russia's nuclear arsenal is like then? Better or worse? Maybe that still have a lot of the old Nuclear power stations running to better supply the materials to maintain their warheads ?
This is a frequent topic of discussion in various forums and I am sure by Very Serious People in Charge [TM].
Extrapolating from the general sad state of the weapon systems in use by Russians where they are at this point unpacking tanks made in 1950, the quality of maintenance on their vehicles, and is difficult to plausibly claim that all the ancient rusty USSR stuff across the strategic rocket barrier is in any sort of usable shape.
Now, if an order to launch is given, some rockets may launch, some of those may actually fly, some of those flying actually get somewhere, and perhaps some of THOSE may actually detonate should they reach the target, and maybe if you're lucky at the designed yield. The percentages in that funnel that aren't known. And nobody [perhaps except some crazies] wants to find them out because even one in the middle of big city is enough.
>Now, if an order to launch is given, some rockets may launch, some of those may actually fly, some of those flying actually get somewhere, and perhaps some of THOSE may actually detonate should they reach the target, and maybe if you're lucky at the designed yield. The percentages in that funnel that aren't known.
I think you're likely wrong about that last part. I would be willing to bet that certain US 3-letter agencies know very well what the percentages in that funnel are. It's clearly enough that the west is careful about direct confrontation with Russia.
Could it be that the source of your skepticism is the fact that you have over the last 2 years seen many comments here on HN asserting that Russia's military is probably incapable of maintaining an effective strategic nuclear capability whereas my comment is the first one you've seen that takes the opposite position?
According to one comment I saw here a few weeks ago, Russia's nukes are probably made of wood.
I suggest searching the web for "Russian nuclear weapons modernization", restricting yourself to credible news outlets.
Still feels like an opinion, as the other commenter said, look at the state of their equipment when going against Ukraine, there is little indication their nukes or their silos, bombers are much better except your opinion.
Opinions are fine, but the evidence against your opinion is currently stronger.
Also, you do realize that Russia is currently winning in Ukraine
They are not "currently winning". By any objective measure, the war on the ground is currently a stalement.
Only problem is that in the long term -- stalemates never work out for the occupiers.
In Russia's case: If the situation continues as it does, and moving at the glacial pace that it does, and draining 10 percent of its GDP every year -- they will ultimately have to give up on their optional neocolonial adventure, pick up their toys and go home.
That's not true, as Ukraine has scored significant non-territorial advances (like forcing most of the occupier's fleet to retreat from Crimea) in the same time frame.
Also you're setting an arbitrary time window of 1 year (when if we want to evaluate the conflict meaningfully, we need to look at how things are moving now compared to the start of the conflict. Which is definitely not the outcome Russia intended. And ignoring Russia's considerable losses in achieving the paltry gains that it has (which are very much part of the attrition equation), etc.
What never works out is a smaller country winning a war of attrition against a (much) bigger opponent.
You're missing the point -- the smaller country doesn't need to "win" the war of attrition (in terms of effecting a complete reversal) in order to win the conflict. It just needs to outlast the occupier. For which there are no end of precedents in history, recent and ancient. Including (ironically) the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan, which is apparently what gave Putin the gigantic (for him) hard-on that inspired him to sign his country for the same inevitable fate in the first place (but with much higher cost and KIA/WIA rates to his people along the way).
Did you catch Zelensky the other day? He knows where this is going.
I don't see any significance to that quote.
But it does seem pretty clear which side you're cheering for, in any case.
>But it does seem pretty clear which side you're cheering for
Whether Russia has the upper hand is an important question for deciding on what policies the NATO countries should pursue, but we cannot have a fruitful public discussion on the question if anyone giving evidence for one side of the question is shouted down as a traitor.
"shouted down as a traitor" does not get at the crux of the problem I see. The problem is that anyone who thinks as follows cannot form an accurate opinion about the likely outcome of the war:
Anyone who argues that Russia is winning the war is probably a Russia sympathizer,
and a Russia sympathizer shouldn't be trusted and consequently we don't have to
consider his argument.
It was more the "cutesy" (and fact-indifferent) way they were arguing their position (rather than the basic proposition what they were arguing) that suggested to me that something was off here. As confirmed by their subsequent posts. I'll withdraw the pro-Russia insinuation if you like (as whichever side, if any they may favor seems irrelevant in this context).
I've personally yet to encounter anybody who holds (or read any arguments in favor of the view) that Russia is outright winning this conflict in any tactical or operational sense, beyond perhaps a very marginal measure - without it becoming immediately clear that the person making them had major gaps in their knowledge, and/or strong biases (as revealed by reciting standard narratives as to the supposed causes of the war). Or without it emerging (as with the sibling commenter) that they just don't seem to give a fuck either way.
Professor of international relations John Mearsheimer claims that Russia is winning and that consequently Ukraine and NATO are in a pickle. The 60 seconds or so after this timestamp is a relevant quote:
Mearsheimer initially comes across as concerned, serious and intelligent. But when we stop to unpack what he's actually saying -- he emerges as a prime example of someone way too ideologically biased and beholden to broken narratives to be taken seriously.
One thing I'll agree on John Mearsheimer is that an incredibly well articulated. He's also absolutely wrong. One of my also russian friends used one of his videos as a proof that everything is west's fault in the conflict in Russia. I patiently listened and what I heard was might makes right/who are we to meddle in the affairs of great Russia or great powers/Russia is great and we're doomed. It's a take that takes ANY agency out of Ukraine or any small country. Catnip for Z-patriots!. He's one of those "useful idiots" that Putin and his gang cultivate around the world.
For just a bit of - at the glance similar - but much, much more thought out and balanced stuff, I would recommend anything at all by Steven Kotkin. He speaks with folks from Brookings quite a bit. His experience is unparalleled and world view is considerably more nuanced
Some choice quotes:
"Vladimir Putin has the old politburo to thank for the huge stockpiles of weapons that were built up during the cold war"
"Russia’s ability to build new tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, or even to refurbish old ones, is hampered by the difficulty of getting components. <...> The lack of high-quality ball-bearings is also a constraint."
"They [military firms] also largely depend on machine tools imported years ago from Germany and Sweden, many of which are now old and hard to maintain."
Given that the country has no ability to produce ball bearings - and in other news, even nails, and can only cast gun barrels in single digits on western equipment, consider me HIGHLY skeptical that any rocket modernization that was supposed to have transpired has gleaming ready to fly stuff. More likely the money was "razpil" (разпилено) - literally "sawn off".
> I really wonder what the state of Russia's nuclear arsenal is like then?
Does it matter?
The thing about a nuclear *deterrent* is that it doesn't have to work. There just has to be a realistic possibility that (at least some of it) it might.
It's a hobby. I read a lot and I have enough formal education to digest primary sources (mostly; my highest qualification is auditing a neutronics course while in grad school).
If you too would like to know way more about nuclear weapons than is useful in civilian life, I'd recommend reading:
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The nuclear weapons FAQ, authored by Carey Sublette, a hobbyist researcher who is extraordinarily dedicated to understanding nuclear weapons from declassified documents and physical principles: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html
Anne C. Fitzpatrick's dissertation Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10596
The nuclear weapons subreddit, particularly posts on it authored by Alex Wellerstein, Carey Sublette, and a few others whose names currently escape me: https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/
Chuck Hansen's book "U.S Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" (out of print, sadly; will have to pay $$$ or find a scanned pirate copy) and his massive book/PDF "The Swords of Armageddon" available for purchase here: http://www.uscoldwar.com/
Let me add "Inventing Accuracy" to your list of recommended reading. It's fascinating, and it's a powerful microscope to reveal the relationship between strategic need and technological development
> it is doubtful that the US would have the confidence to replace its current high-maintenance weapons stockpile with a new generation of low-maintenance weapons
That's peace time thinking. Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima without ever having performed a full scale test of the design. Our knowledge and modeling capabilities today are more than sufficient to produce and stockpile a new design that is guaranteed to work -- without testing an actual weapon -- if that somehow became necessary.
There are many reasons why a nuclear power such as the US is unlikely to consider doing this, but lack of confidence in weapon design or manufacture is not among those reasons.
Current warheads = 3.7k
I wonder how long a nuke in storage lasts - ie, how much work does it take to maintain a stockpile of x nukes, and if you can turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily.