If We Tried to Use Our Nukes, Would They Work?
5th July 2017
Hint: Probably not.
Nuclear weapons such as the W87, W88, B-61 (various versions) and B-83 were designed to be absolutely state of the art in terms of yield-weight ratio, using the technology of the 1970s and 1980s. The expected service life of those nuclear weapons was about 20 years, after which they’d be retired and replaced with more modern ones.
Well, that isn’t happening and no one really understands how keeping these weapons past their expected service lives is affecting their reliability — the high explosive surrounding the plutonium pits keep absorbing radiation.
It can be removed and replaced but the high explosive is literally glued to the pit and sometimes cracks when it’s taken off.
There’s also the question of exposing personnel to additional radiation as a result of americium-241 ingrowth in the plutonium core.
And, of course, none of this can be tested. The Nuclear Matters Handbook also mentions some known safety upgrades that cannot be installed, because no one knows how they might affect reliability.
As a minor aside, it has been well over twenty-five years, since the U.S. tested a weapon with a yield in excess of 150 kilotons, so the secondary designs of existing weapons may well be from the 1960s …