From: petertrei@gmail.com
On 1/22/2026 1:09 PM, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> Torbjorn Lindgren writes:
>> 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).
>
> They also have the UR-100N (AKA RS-18A, NATO SS-19) with a hypersonic
> glide vehicle as the payload. The glide vehicle travels
> at mach 20+; alone without a warhead; the glide vehicle
> impact is equivalent to 42,000 pounds of TNT (at Mach 25) even if the
> nuclear payload is missing or fails to detonate.
>
> The Zircon nuclear capable hypersonic cruise missile is another
> potential delivery vehicle, although the Ukranians claim to have
> intercepted them with Patriot missiles.
Wikipedia agrees about the claimed speeds for the Avengard hypersonic
vehicle.
However, I have questions as to whether Mach 25 is achievable in a glide
vehicle - LEO orbital velocity is about Mach 18. How are you going
to make the vehicle go down?
pt
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
