Here’s a report from Damien Leimbach a former US avionics technician in the U.S. Air Force:
Why do most western military analysts think that Russian nuclear warheads may not be up to date due to lack of maintenance? Tritium is one of the most expensive, commercially available substances on earth. Currently it trades around $30K USD per gram. Why? You need a breeder reactor to make it.
The odds that the officers in charge of the Russian strategic rocket forces did not sell off tritium to the highest bidder is near zero, especially in light of the fact that all the other officers have been busy selling off everything that wasn’t nailed down for decades.
For H-bomb, fusion warheads, the tritium needs to be replenished every few years. This is a highly technical and very difficult procedure. The plutonium plugs also require maintenance. The chances that the maintenance was performed properly, even if the tritium was made available, is zero. [no, not zero, but something in between].
Ballistic missiles, especially liquid fueled ones, require constant maintenance and inspections. Rocket fuel, even for solid rockets, does not last forever. Chemicals degrade. Cracks appear in the fuel slugs, which create hot spots and jetting in the wrong places during launch. This leads to explosions and why the solid-fuels rockets have a shelf life of 20–30 years. The chances this solid fuel is replaced, or the maintenance is done, or done properly? You guessed it, zero. There is an entire paper the Air Force sponsored about this.
Now, the fission warheads that trigger the fusion explosion will still work, but they tend to be very small, since they are really there to trigger the H-bomb. The missiles themselves used to be built by a company called Yuzhmash. Guess where that is? In Ukraine. Guess who doesn’t sell them rockets or parts anymore? Ukraine.
The facilities for major warhead maintenance were all located in Ukraine. But even if the Russian hierarchy had been diligent, none of their warheads could have seen major maintenance since 2014 when Ukraine cut them off. Russia tried building their own nuclear ballistic missile, the Satan II. So far out of five test flights, four have exploded.
Why? The population is aging out and they don’t have the engineers and technicians they used to. As recently as 2012 the United States was helping Russian technicians take apart Russia’s own warheads under the START treaty because they didn’t know how to handle their own equipment. If they can’t take them apart without help, they can’t maintain them plain and simple.
This is an exaggeration to say “none” have been maintained. He apparently is too young to remember that the US built them an entire warhead dismantling factory in Russia under Nun-Lugar legislation, after the phony fall of the Soviet Union, but as soon as it was built the Russians locked our inspectors and technicians out of it. This facility has the ability to deal with Tritium and other nuclear components. Whether or not they have trained new technicians and have the nuclear high tech materials to do quantitative and qualitative maintenance is still a question but it’s not “zero”
Britain spends roughly 9 billion a year in Nuclear Weapon maintenance and they have 225 warheads on 4 submarines which is the only delivery system they maintain. France spends the same for 300 warheads. China spends about 10 billion for an arsenal of around 300. The US spends, wait for it, $37 billion. A year.
Russia? Russia spends less money on maintenance than anyone else, yet you really think they can afford to maintain 1500 on alert warheads and a triad of submarines, silos, and mobile launchers. It’s not just a little off it’s laughable to think that. Based on the budgets on paper Russia at best can afford 200-300 weapons. These are just the numbers on paper! Add in the corruption it’s definitely way less. Pretty much Zero.
I think much of his evidence comes from this report by the Lancing Institute. However, I’m not as optimistic about how degraded the Soviet arsenal is. As I said above, I think they have done some maintenance in the facility we built for them after the phony fall of the Soviet Union, and they do still have considerable nuclear potential, but I think critics may be right about the possibility of the older Russia nuclear forces being largely degraded. This may be yet another reason why Putin has not made good on his nuclear threats—to not reveal this weakness.
In contrast, the US spend billions on maintaining its nuclear arsenal, and we shoot off one minuteman III missile each year to prove they still work. The Lansing Institute article above talks about how the Russians have cancelled almost all of their recent missile tests, and US officials suspect that it is because they don’t want the West to know about their failure rate.