Jim's Blog

As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance.

In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving.

Our art is crap, we no longer build Cathedrals, but until recently, weapons were good and improving.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review has recently appeared, revealing that we have lost all nuclear military technology:

U.S. production of tritium, a critical strategic material for nuclear weapons, is now insufficient to meet the forthcoming U.S. nuclear force sustainment demands, or to hedge against unforeseen developments. Programs are planned, but not yet fully funded, to ease these critical production shortfalls.

This is euphemistic.  Recent attempts to produce tritium were fully funded, but failed, which failure resulted in new plans for new attempts to produce tritium, which have not yet been fully funded.

I have regularly remarked on America’s inability to produce tritium.  All existing nuclear weapons require tritium to juice their detonation, and without tritium, would produce a low yield explosion.  Tritium decays over time, and so fresh tritium continually needs to be added.  The US is out of tritium, has repeatedly attempted to produce more, and repeatedly failed.

Fully funding the Obamacare website did not produce an Obamacare website, and I doubt that fully funding proposed new tritium production facilities will produce tritium.

In the absence of sustained support for these programs, including a marked increase in the planned production of tritium in the next few years, our nuclear capabilities will inevitably atrophy and degrade below requirements.

The U.S. is also unable to produce or process a number of other critical materials, including lithium and enriched uranium. For instance, the United States largely relies on dismantling retired warheads to recover lithium to sustain and produce deployable warheads. This may be inadequate to support the nuclear force replacement program and any supplements to it.

So, our enrichment facilities have ceased to function across the board.

And, recapping my previous remarks on technological decline:

Fighter planes are getting slower, and can no longer fly as high or as far.

We need Pu238 for nuclear batteries. The 2006 New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt was launched without enough Pu238 to keep all its equipment live during the Pluto flyby, and without enough Pu238 to do its Kuiper belt mission,

Existing nuclear weapons have not received maintenance for a very long time, and it is unclear whether there is anyone with the relevant skills to perform maintenance and adequately test them for readiness.

Fusion weapons require lithium enriched in lithium six to juice them.  Enriched lithium does not decay, but the US has lost the capability to make more of it.

Attempts to build new nuclear reactors in the US keep running into indefinite delays.  To make significant amounts of plutonium 239  will need new reactors.

Plutonium 239 is the stuff used in nuclear weapons, plutonium 238 the stuff used in nuclear batteries, plutonium 240 is the stuff you don’t want because it spontaneously fissions.  You want to produce your plutonium using enriched uranium in a sodium cooled fast neutron reactor because then you get considerably more of the plutonium you want, and considerably less of the plutonium you do not want.  The US used to build fast neutron reactors, but all recent attempts to build a fast neutron reactor in the west have failed, and all existing fast neutron reactors in the West have stopped working.  The only existing fast neutron reactors that are working well enough to produce significant amounts of plutonium are in Russia and China.

If all existing fast neutron reactors have ceased to work, if all our existing isotopic enrichment plants have ceased to work, should we really believe that our existing nuclear weapons will work?

Money, “full funding”, is unlikely to be the issue.  Obama threw stupendous amounts of money at the Obamacare website, and the site did not come up.   It only came up when a conspicuously undiverse team of white and east Asian heterosexual males led by white heterosexual males took over the job.

Nuclear weapons were produced by western civilization, and since 1972 the core project of our universities has been “Western Civilization has got to go.”

Science requires a level of trust and trustworthiness that a diverse society is incapable of, and a level of truth speaking that a progressive post christian society is incapable of.