From: tl@none.invalid   
      
   Christian Weisgerber   wrote:   
   >On 2026-01-19, Lynn McGuire  wrote:   
   >> I am horribly wondering if the tritium in Russia's ICBMs is still good.   
   >   
   >Tritium has a civilian market.  *Glances at watch face*  So there's   
   >incentive to syphon off tritium and sell it.  That said, as far as   
   >I know, a tritium-boosted warhead will still explode without tritium,   
   >it just has a lower yield.   
      
   Yeah and also sell of the replacement instead of putting it in a ICBM.   
   Similar to how say a lot of Russion body armor turned out to either   
   not actually exist or the expensive parts had been sold off and   
   replaced by inferior products (like egg crates).   
      
   Getting back to what would happen - the main decay product of tritium   
   is He-3 which has a very large neutron capture cross-section - meaning   
   it acts as a "poison" for the nuclear reaction rather than boosting   
   it. This is why the bomb has to be flushed and then refilled, not just   
   topped up.   
      
   So it's not just the lack of boosting, the resulting He-3 actively   
   removes neutrons needed for fission to happen. We also have to   
   remember that 1960+ era nuclear weapon from US/Russia/China uses WAY   
   less fissile material than the old non-boosted designs. So that's two   
   factors working against it.   
      
   I wouldn't be surprised if at least in case of severe poisoning it   
   could (often?) end up as a non-nuclear dirty bomb - but this is just   
   based on informed reasoning rather than actual calculations so could   
   be completely wrong.   
      
   There's more than enough public information that someone could do the   
   calculation for various known warheads and find out if there's a point   
   beyond where fission can be sustained on each design but I'm not up to   
   that. I fully expect a number of countries have done these   
   calculations.   
      
   Would I want to RELY on them not exploding though? Nope, especially   
   not ALL of them not exploding.   
      
      
   > There's the question how much the delivery systems have deteriorated,   
   > e.g. whether the ICBMs would still make it out of the silo.  But   
   > Russia has a lot of nuclear-capable delivery systems--all the   
   > ballistic and cruise missles they shoot at Ukraine are   
   > nuclear-capable--so I expect they would be able to field _some_   
   > working ones.   
      
   The three consecutive RS-28 Sarmat testing failures doesn't exactly   
   fill you with confidence in their newest ICBMs. AFAIK it's only been   
   tested successfully once, the initial test that lead them to declare   
   it "operational". There was some successful partial tests before that   
   though.   
      
   Still, that's a 75% failure rate on "full tests". And that abysmal   
   failure rate is on test flights where they have the luxury of waiting   
   and fixing things until there's no known problems instead of "we need   
   to launch NOW"...   
      
   Yes, they have older R-36M (being retired and replaced by RS-28) and a   
   bunch of other ICBM and IRBM systems so SOME will undoubtedly fly.   
   Very hard to tell how many, I suspect that Russia has no idea either   
   (though they may think they have).   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)