This war has shown that Russia’s military is a hodgepodge mess of corruption, shoddy maintenance, cutting of corners and all-around sloppiness and ineptitude. If their tires are bursting from not being maintained, and convoys needed ice-cream-truck-like vehicles for resupply, one has to question how well Russia’s stockpile of 6,000 nukes is maintained.
Nuclear maintenance is extremely expensive and troublesome. I don’t know the intricate details well (it would take Stranger on a Train to do that for us) but there should be serious question as to how well the Russians are doing it. It’s probable that no more than a fraction of their arsenal is even usable (although even a fraction would still be MAD-catastrophe.) How much of the nuke-maintenance budget is being siphoned off by corrupt officers towards personal ends?
Even more troubling, how lax may the security be, and what are the chances of someone selling a nuke on the black market in the upcoming decades?
I don’t believe the breakup of the USSR had any nuclear weapons get into the wrong hands.
As you point out, even if a small percentage of them work, they are still capable of MAD.
At this particular time, I would take reports of Russian military faults or perfections with many grains of salt.
Regarding the Russian nuclear system, maintenance and readiness is hard to tell for sure. But I suspect it would be at a top level in comparison to less critical military systems. In most large organizations there are varying levels of sloppiness and maybe actual corruption. But by their nature, some are more resistant to this. Nuclear missile systems, and the command of them will always be under tighter scrutiny and stricter methods than tire rotation. Not sure if the missiles are always fueled. But if they are, then lax maintenance can show up in drastic failures.
I don’t know about this part. We can see these faults directly out on the battlefield. We’re not relying on reports. If Russia could do better, they would be.
I think it’s reasonable to wonder if the same level of corruption and lack of consequential oversight applies to Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Especially because of MAD: corrupt individuals would think that, since the bombs would never be used, they’d not get found out.
But I also agree that, if anything would be under higher scrutiny, it would be the nuclear program, and that we can’t afford to make assumptions.
I don’t think selling them on the black market is a huge risk, though, because said nukes would only have value if you tell people you have them. The smaller the arsenal, the more their value would be in being a deterrent, not in actual use. (And even in the largest arsenals, their value is already mostly in being a deterrent.)
If you are a state that wants nukes to keep others from invading you, yes.
If you are a terrorist who wants to blow shit up to make some sort of political statement, it’s better that no one knows you have it until it goes off.
Eight years ago I visited F.E. Warren AFB for a week. The entire base is dedicated to overseeing our MMIII missiles. They spend lots of money every year to ensure they’re in proper working order. Spent some time in one of the silos. The complexity and level of engineering is far greater than what you might think.
I’ve been wondering this, too. The poor maintenance we’ve been seeing has been in the portion of the military that everyone intended to actually use. By contrast, everyone who has nukes knows that if they ever use any of them, they’re dead. Nobody ever actually intends to use nukes, and there’s therefore no value in actually having them. What value they have isn’t in having them, it’s in everyone knowing you have them, whether that knowledge is correct or not.
I could see a master disseminator of misinformation like Putin deciding that it was cheaper to just let the arsenal go to pot, while maintaining the pretext that it was still functional. And I could see him starting to worry, in the current situation, that his bluff will be called. And if he were worried about someone calling his bluff, then I’d expect him to be acting a lot like he is now, with clearly-ludicrous bluster (as opposed to plausible bluster, like threatening to use nukes).
Depends on what you mean by “the wrong hands”. There have been several instances of nuclear materials winding up in the hands of people who had no idea what they held, with tragic results.
According to this, it costs about $60 billion a year to maintain the US nuclear arsenal
I’m not sure what all would ‘need’ to be funded if they were only concerned with ICBMs and not with submarines and bombers, however that article states that ICBMs alone cost about 8 billion a year minimum to maintain. But I’m sure its well into the billions annually. Russias military budget for most of the 90s was barely 10 billion a year total, after the year 2000 or so it slowly grew to 60 billion a year.
Also isn’t there a part that has to be replaced every 10 years or the bomb stops working?
According to this, France spends 3.4 billion euros a year maintaining their nuclear stockpile of about 300 bombs, and it’ll go up to 6 billion a year by 2025.
These figures seem to imply it costs about ~10 million a year to maintain each nuclear weapon (US has about 6000 nuclear weapons, spends 60 billion. France has 300 nuclear weapons, spends about 3-6 billion euros).
Notwithstanding how tragic many of those incidents were, nuclear materials do not equate to nuclear weapons, materials from nuclear weapons, or materials suitable for nuclear weapons.
I have a fuzzy memory of reading about the poor conditions of Soviet missile silos back during one of the arms reductions treaties. IIRC, quite a few of the missiles the Soviets agreed to get rid of were quite possibly useless anyway because they had a problem keeping the silos from flooding repeatedly. It was a long time ago and as I said I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, but for some reason it’s always stuck in my head.
You mean tritium? Half-life is 12.3 years, so it must be replenished. So it must be produced in a nuclear reactor; perhaps there is some verified production data…
I went into an abandoned missile silo about 45 years ago. Me and three buddies. One of the hatches to get down to it had not been welded shut. Yes it was huge with tunnels leading off all over the place. Very, very creepy. Getting off subject though.
When I was in grad school in the late 90s, I wrote a paper on the Soviet submarine fleet. At the time, the Russians were letting their older nuclear subs sink in place in the North Sea as the seawater acted as coolant for the decaying reactors. That was almost 25 years ago and it doesn’t seem like their maintenance plans have improved.