WilhelmIII on Nostr: Nukes have a number of components that degrade, and others that don't. For a ...
Nukes have a number of components that degrade, and others that don't.
For a thermonuclear warhead the primary fissile material, generally highly enriched uranium, is rather stable. The material for the secondary, tritium, will need to be replaced every 10 years or so, but the nuclear site at Dimona is more than capable of making replacement tritium.
The other degradable parts are the high explosives and the electronics. Radiation can do odd things to materials and the US explosive for nuclear implosion, Octol, is reasonably stable. I expect that Israel has the formula.
And the electronics are no problem. Israel has a highly functional electronics manufacturing base.
What Israel doesn't have is a continuously improving space program. Much of what the US learned with Atlas and Saturn was rolled back into the Titan program and the Shuttle SRBs and Minutemen engines are not all that different.
But putting things in space and bringing them back down where you want to is hard. And Israel doesn't have a way to practice that.
So, while I expect that their warheads will work just fine, I think their ability to deliver them at any significant distance is rather suspect.
For a thermonuclear warhead the primary fissile material, generally highly enriched uranium, is rather stable. The material for the secondary, tritium, will need to be replaced every 10 years or so, but the nuclear site at Dimona is more than capable of making replacement tritium.
The other degradable parts are the high explosives and the electronics. Radiation can do odd things to materials and the US explosive for nuclear implosion, Octol, is reasonably stable. I expect that Israel has the formula.
And the electronics are no problem. Israel has a highly functional electronics manufacturing base.
What Israel doesn't have is a continuously improving space program. Much of what the US learned with Atlas and Saturn was rolled back into the Titan program and the Shuttle SRBs and Minutemen engines are not all that different.
But putting things in space and bringing them back down where you want to is hard. And Israel doesn't have a way to practice that.
So, while I expect that their warheads will work just fine, I think their ability to deliver them at any significant distance is rather suspect.