[mauvehaus]

I think the more realistic need to produce new nuclear weapons is that for some reason parts availability for the existing ones becomes a maintenance problem. If Warhead A requires Part B which must be produced via an industrial process that was last widely used in the '70s, you no longer have a credible warhead.

It may not even be possible to spin that process back up even on a bespoke basis because it may depend on yet further now-outdated processes. Even if that's not the case, executing to a high enough degree of precision for the application may depend on a lot of now-lost trade knowledge.

But yeah, apart from the sustainment problem, there's definitely no way that replacing 80% of the US nuclear arsenal matters if the warheads were expended in anger or destroyed on the ground by nuclear weapons.

[mikeyouse]

The sustainment problem is solved as well - there was the infamous example of the "fogbank" aerogel that we lost capacity to build. It turns out it's easy enough (with an unlimited pile of money) to reverse engineer any component we might need and rebuild capacity. Nuclear weapons aren't "complicated" once you've figured out the science, they're just expensive to engineer.

Since we have maybe 10x more warheads that we need, we can easily salvage any components from decommissioned ones which is actually what's leading to the plutonium storage problems from the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

[mauvehaus]

Taking everything in the article at face value (and assuming the substance actually exists and isn't an elaborate disinformation campaign), it took over a decade and $100,000,000 to recreate this single part of the warhead.

I don't know if we can call this a runaway sustainment success story. It's not as though we actually have limitless piles of money to throw at weapons systems.

[scotty79]

> $100,000,000

Which still is 0.2% of what one dude paid to run one crappy social network.