Back at the beginning of the arms race, the US believed Russian propaganda that they had significantly more nukes than the US was capable of producing.
By the time the US had around 4000 nukes, later intelligence revealed Russia had 4. The US decided to maintain the policy of the arms race as it was very beneficial to the defense industry and research.
The cost to develop and maintain a working thermonuclear weapon is enormous, let alone fission bombs. Russia never had the resources to maintain an arsenal the West isn’t capable of intercepting. You may recall the “Iron Dome” missile defence system that was removed from Europe.
The rocket platforms are expensive enough. The nuclear material requires time, maintenance, and a fuck load of power to produce.
I get the fear. China can do it, they have all the resources and knowledge to. Same with India.
Facts of nukes help: Tritium has a halflife of 12.3 years. Meaning after 12.3 years, the amount of tritium in a nuke is half. the 500lbs of tritium in the 60s is now 35lbs today. Obviously I dont know how much is needed to make a nuke, but it’s not easy to concentrate tritium well. The most effective way is replacing control rods in nuclear reactors with lithium rods. But that’s not the real issue. That’s relatively minor.
The problem is weapons grade uranium or plutonium. You need to enrich those to very high % of U-235 to get a big enough blast to trigger the fusion reaction. To do that, enormous, power intensive centrifuge facilities are required. And it takes a long time to produce enough for a fission bomb.
Given that Putin operates on wealth, and the shit state of the Russian military? They didn’t maintain any operational nukes after the Soviet Union fell.
Tritium has a halflife of 12.3 years.
A nitpick: that’s why you use lithium-6 deuteride. It gets converted to tritium by radiation at a moment’s notice. Lithium 6 is a stable isotope.
Ok, so I hadn’t known about that. I am surprised I didn’t know about that. It does look like producing it is a minor problem - ~5% of natural lithium is in this form. You can apparently make it in nuclear reactors as well. But you’re right, once you produce it, you have it.
However, to further my point, isotope separation isn’t exactly easy, and other than the use for nuclear fusion, lithium-6 dueteride doesn’t have value, outside selling for nuclear weapons.
Knowing about how Putin sold and nationalized private business and government entities in the 90s and early 2000s, I wouldn’t be surprised if he sold the Soviet stockpile for an enormous amount to otherwise sanctioned countries.
The reason I came to this conclusion was when they withdrew from the Test Ban treaty, and have yet to actually succeed in a nuclear weapon test. I think they are attempting to rebuild their arsenal, and it’s not going well.
Russia is the largest country and has access to all the natural ressources necessary. Also Russia has a large civil nuclear industry. Not only their power plants, but also production of Rods for nuclear reactors. A lot of the European nuclear plants run on rods produced in Russia.
Also the nukes are Russias main deterrent and western intelligence, in particular the US aren’t stupid. Maintaining a sufficient arsenal must have been Russias main strategic objective since 1990.
If Russia didn’t have enough working nukes for MAD, the western response would look very different.
Again i get the whish to think like this, but it is naive to believe Russia would have zero working nukes.
They definitely report the spending levels to maintain a mixed arsenal, and tbh looking at Russian modernization decisions, they’re focusing on the ‘better’ delivery methods like sea and air launch.
Russian leadership’s apparent conviction that the US ballistic missile defense system constitutes a real future risk to the credibility of Russia’s retaliatory capability. The poor performance and loss of a significant portion of Russian conventional forces in the war against Ukraine and the depletion of its weapon stockpiles will likely deepen Russia’s reliance on nuclear weapons for its national defense.
They got drained hard in Ukraine and showed the world that Russia was a paper tiger - only good for a thunder run leadership decapitation or beating back irregular and militant forces. Nukes are their prestige weapon, and the hand wringing over escalation has only served to validate their faith.
