Here Come the Nukes?

The Ukrainian military is now acknowledging several new successes northwest of Kyiv, but whether those successes will result in the true encirclement of the Russian artillery positions north of the city remains unknowable. For the first time, however, such encirclement appears to be a genuine threat to Russian forces. Cutting off already tenuous Russian supply lines in the region could upend whatever shreds remain of Russian strategy—but we can also presume Putin's military will itself take desperate steps to try to prevent that outcome.

Liberal Author wrote:First, nuclear weapons have a shelf life. They aren’t like bullets and chemical artillery shells that you can wrap in grease paper and come back 50 years later and expect they will still work. They have critical parts made of radioisotopes which decay, and must be serviced to replace those components. There are probably several service items that have to be maintained but the big one I want to focus on is Tritium gas.

Modern fission weapons are boosted with Tritium gas. They have hollow cores, actually “levitated” cores with a hollow sphere of fissionable material surrounding a smaller solid sphere which is suspended by wires in the center. This is more effective at compression, like using a hammer instead of pushing on a nail. But it’s not enough to make an atomic bomb the size of a bowling ball.

Tritium has a half-life of 12.5 years, so it goes away over time. Worse, its decay product is Helium-3, which absorbs neutrons, so it’s critical to refresh the boosting gas periodically. The exact interval is a closely held secret but there is broad agreement that it is at most every 10 years, and unlikely to be much less than 5 for practical reasons. Whatever the interval, it’s a simple matter of math to work out that every bomb needs about 0.2 grams of new Tritium per year on average.