Some under-reported news from last week: Russia withdrew from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and literally hours later the U.S. conducted a nuclear test.
The U.S. conducted a high-explosive experiment at a nuclear test site in Nevada hours after Russia revoked a ban on atomic-weapons testing, which Moscow said would put it on par with the United States.
Wednesday’s test used chemicals and radioisotopes to “validate new predictive explosion models” that can help detect atomic blasts in other countries, Bloomberg reported, citing the Department of Energy.
So, a nuclear test, but not a nuclear/fission device. It seems like this was a test using conventional high explosive mixed with radioactive isotopes, For Science.
“These experiments advance our efforts to develop new technology in support of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals,” Corey Hinderstein, Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in a statement. “They will help reduce global nuclear threats by improving the detection of underground nuclear explosive tests.”
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty is a bit of an outlier, because it was signed, but not ratified, by the United States, and never went into force because China, Egypt, Iran and Israel also signed but never ratified it, and other “Annex 2” countries India, North Korea and Pakistan never signed it. Despite that, the United States and Russia had been adhering to its terms until Putin decided to do his “Look at me, I’m a big scary nuclear power, fear my wrath!” thing to distract people from his continued failure in Ukraine.
Like Russia’s withdrawal from START, there’s not much to worry about here. The United States is going to spend some $634 billion this decade maintaining its nuclear deterrent. Russia, already broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression in Ukraine, has probably spent decades under-funding the nuclear program it inherited from the Soviet Union, and the endemic corruption and the brain drain of nuclear scientists to richer western countries probably hasn’t helped either.
The U.S is still a signatory to a number of other nuclear weapons treaties. But it’s pretty interesting that the Department of Energy had this one cued up and ready to go immediately after the Russkies nixed the treaty…
Tags: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), Department of Energy, Foreign Policy, Military, nuclear weapons, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Vladimir Putin
So high explosives, “chemicals and radioisotopes”.
They built an on-purpose fizzle? Or better yet, had one built already? Or did they just pull the fissiley bits (mostly – fissiles being both “chemicals” and “radio-isotopes”) from an existing device and fire it off?
Nuclear device trigger have a limited shelve life and must be replace (about 12 years) or they’re just a very expensive paper weight.
“Wednesday’s test used chemicals and radioisotopes to “validate new predictive explosion models” that can help detect atomic blasts in other countries, Bloomberg reported, citing the Department of Energy.”
This would be a Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD) which is neither “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion” prohibited by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.
One of the ongoing theoretical arguements in “special weapons” circles is whether half life degradation is consistent in all material samples. The new theory is half life decay increases with enrichment and material cross section.
The ‘pits’ in current use are mostly 50 years old (some older) and were enriched to barely critical levels.
The hard data that original planning is based on is taken from tiny lab samples, and extrapolated from there. The newer data models are theory and computer derived, taking into account quantum theory wrinkles.
This is also why the Dept of Energy is restarting the plutonium refining and manufacturing operation. Data mining of the info from years of ‘rework’ from Pantex suggest there might be statistical issues coming up. As in, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.
ed in texas: So, obviously avoiding all that should be avoided, what does applying high explosives to “chemicals and radioisotopes” add to answering that question? Is it just the easiest way to gather statistics from throughout a previously-solid material in question all at once?
And as an aside:
If the QC from our production raises the “maybe it doesn’t” question, what does the, umm, “less stringent” Soviet-era QC infer about their devices going “doesn’t”? Or did their designers just design the fission sides of their devices way over criticality thresholds under the “tractor mechanic” theory of maintenance?
Is the politically opportunistic Russian withdrawal from the treaty provisions something that at base was driven by some pointed technical inquiries into whether anything would go “does” if an order were to be given to nuke some pesky Ukrainians? The treaty would be in eth way of
To conclude:
If the answer to said queries received was “we do not know if any will work,” the obvious fixes would be a lot easier if testing were not prohibited, so the treaty would be in the way of “fixing” some number of the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal.
Really makes you wonder what the actual results of a “nuclear holocaust” would be.
Friend of mine was on the early post-Soviet Union START treaty inspection teams. After talking to him, I am pretty sure that the end result of some idiot politician “pushing the button” would be a whole lot of egg on a whole lot of faces, around the world.
Or, maybe not. Maybe it would all work, as advertised, and we’d all be dead. But, given the state of the things I’ve seen over the years, I would bet that it’s gonna be egg on face time, particularly for the people using the former Soviet technology/production base.
[…] BATTLESWARM: Russia: “We Are Withdrawing From The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” U.S.: “OK.” BOOM! […]
The Russians are pulling out because they NEED to test. Their nukes are old, built with Soviet quality control, and they don’t have the resources or tech to simulate everything without testing like we do. Truth is, if Putin pushes the button (particularly on a tactical nuke), he has no idea whether it’s going to work.
I have doubted for many years that the Russian nuclear arsenal, by and large, works. Oh, I’m sure that some of their nukes would work. One wonders if even they know which ones. Or it may be that they secretly have a small group of nukes, maintained by an uncorrupted cadre that is well-funded. I doubt it. While the US nukes very likely all work, it is likely that only a small number of the dilapidated Russian nukes work. However, I hope we never have to find out the hard way.
I suspect at least 75% of the ICBM wouldn’t make it out of the silo. More than half the bombs would fail and I doubt 10% of the bombers would hit targets. Not sure about the sea leg of the triad. I’d say few, if any tactical nukes would have high order yields.
the easiest thing for both sides to do is just to remanufacture the warheads. Most of the stuff is recyclable. Easier for Russia because they apparently have the full nuclear fuel cycle in house. Apparently.
“the easiest thing for both sides to do is just to remanufacture the warheads. Most of the stuff is recyclable. Easier for Russia because they apparently have the full nuclear fuel cycle in house. Apparently.”
Plutonium doesn’t recycle well and nuclear weapons engineers prefer to get fresh Pu-239 from abbreviated fast breeder reactor runs. This avoids isotopic creep.
Rosatom is the only organization in the world which can perform every step in the nuclear fuel cycle, from ore extraction to fuel enrichment to delivery to recycling. Even the French have to rely on Rosatom for their recycling.
I seem to recall reading some open source analysis after the USSR came apart which used access to historical targeting information in some of those archives in Moscow that were open for a bit if you could pay everyone with their hands out in the archive hallways as you walked to the right door.
The analysis was flummoxed on how massively the Soviet targeteers overtargeted. They had a lots and lots and lots of warheads all aimed at the same targets – military, industrial, government, and population targets, all way over what the US would do. This caused the analyzing folks to wonder if the Soviets thought the US had some secret anti-missile defense systems squirreled away in silos in spite of the treaty, which in turn led to wondering if that treaty-allowed ABM system around Moscow was really the only thing the Soviets kept.
A more practical explanation was the current topic, some level of appreciation by those targeteers into the fraction of missiles that would fail to even spin up, or fail during launch, or fail during ascent, or fail on reentry, or in the end after reentry the physics package bits not actually going off, or underperforming if they did. If a large number at random could be expected to not go boom, they needed to assign lots and lots to whatever they wanted to hit.
The other thing I recall was the target list was not kept up – they had fully decommissioned bases still overtargeted years after there was openly nothing military there anymore. Clearly throwing missiles at things like Titan silos and abandoned SAC airbases would detract from working-warhead-on-live-target as well, but there was apparently no bureaucratic constituency in the Politburo or military for scrubbing their target list.
Extra points were awarded for the Foamy the Squirrel reference!
Some great commentary here. I’ve been trying to explain nuclear warhead maintenance to academic colleagues for about 3 decades at least. Most of them appear to believe that you just make a warhead, attach it to the top of a missile and then you never have to look at it again, and both missile and warhead work perfectly after 25 years or so.
Oddly, most of them realize that few even very simple manufactured devices can be left unattended and expected to function after even 10 years.
I loved my colleagues, mostly, but they could be really dense.
At one time, in a dept of 25 or so, two were veterans. Me and a Turk who had spent 18 months as a tank commander “be cause I had a college degree. I knew noth ing about tanks.”