Current Nuclear Weapons Development

Forest Green said:
breakingdefense.com

West drawing near to 'third nuclear age,' says head of UK armed forces - Breaking Defense

UK Chief of the Defence Staff Adm. Tony Radakin, also said there is only a “remote” chance that Russia attacks the UK — a projection that is also true for NATO as a whole — while Moscow understands that a retaliatory response would be overwhelming, “whether conventional or nuclear.”
breakingdefense.com breakingdefense.com
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Yes, with every nation that can even remotely afford nukes going to acquire them. After Russia invaded Ukraine and suffered no major consequences despite the 1994 treaty where Ukraine gave up all the Soviet-era nukes on Ukrainian territory in exchange for territorial guarantees, any remotely sane nation would see that possessing nukes is the only way to avoid someone invading you.
 
By 2030 or by 2020?
www.spacewar.com

Defense Department report: China to have 1K nuclear weapons in arsenal by 2030

Washington DC (UPI) Dec 18, 2024 - The Chinese Communist Party intends to add more nuclear arms to its growing arsenal while expanding its global influence and sovereignty, a Department of Defense report says.
www.spacewar.com

www.airandspaceforces.com

Watchdog: Issues with Program Management of Nuclear Warheads

The National Nuclear Security Administration needs more consistency in how it manages warhead programs, the GAO said.
www.airandspaceforces.com www.airandspaceforces.com
 
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Josh_TN said:
It actually is easier to stabilize the VLF antenna from a slower prop driven aircraft, from what I’ve read. There would be a lot of parts available and a rough strip capability as well.
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I've also read that.

Apparently the VLF antenna needs to hang as close to vertical as possible, which is easiest with a slow aircraft.
 
NMaude said:
Wouldn't the EC-130J be a retrograde step? It's not as capable aircraft as the E-6.
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Yes, in a sense. The E-130J (that's official, not EC-130J) loses the other function of the E-6B as a Looking Glass airborne launch control aircraft for the Air Force ICBMs. The Air Force will have to cover that function with their new E-4C SAOC aircraft.
 
breakingdefense.com

US completes $9B B61-12 nuclear warhead upgrade - Breaking Defense

Technically, the B61-12 is not a “new” nuclear weapon that increases the stockpile, as the US is taking the warheads from the older bombs and placing them in new housings.
breakingdefense.com breakingdefense.com

Notably, the agency announcement says that with “production of the B61-12 LEP now complete, NNSA will transition to producing the B61-13 bomb.” The B61-13, announced in October 2023, is designed to have a higher-yield in the range of a 360 kiloton blast, which would represent a major step up from the 50 kiloton B61-12.
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I wonder how much of the conversion work creating the B61-12 involved rebuilding its' physics package?
 
NMaude said:
I wonder how much of the conversion work creating the B61-12 involved rebuilding its' physics package?
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Given the cost of the materials in the physics package, probably quite a bit. Tritium is only marginally less expensive than diamond per gram and the fission fuel, while an order of magnitude less, is still more expensive than gold by two orders of magnitude.
brightside.me

The 12 Most Expensive Materials In The World

For many centuries, lots of people have believed that gold is one of the most expensive materials in the world. This, however, is absolutely wrong.
brightside.me brightside.me
 
Forest Green said:
Given the cost of the materials in the physics package, probably quite a bit. Tritium is only marginally less expensive than diamond per gram and the fission fuel, while an order of magnitude less, is still more expensive than gold by two orders of magnitude.
brightside.me

The 12 Most Expensive Materials In The World

For many centuries, lots of people have believed that gold is one of the most expensive materials in the world. This, however, is absolutely wrong.
brightside.me brightside.me
Click to expand...
My understanding of the B61-12 was that they were taking old physics packages and installing them into new airframes/shapes that had attachment points for the JDAM tail kit (or an equivalent to the JDAM tailkit built in, the descriptions are not clear on that point).

This doesn't mean that the old physics packages didn't need any refurbishment, however.
 
Scott Kenny said:
My understanding of the B61-12 was that they were taking old physics packages and installing them into new airframes/shapes that had attachment points for the JDAM tail kit (or an equivalent to the JDAM tailkit built in, the descriptions are not clear on that point).

This doesn't mean that the old physics packages didn't need any refurbishment, however.
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The issue is upgrading from 50kt (in the -12) to 360kt in the -13.
 
Forest Green said:
The issue is upgrading from 50kt (in the -12) to 360kt in the -13.
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That is the difference between using a mod 4 tactical warhead vs a mod 7 strategic warhead as your starting point. Both will be heavily refurbished as part of the process, but the yields are related to the parent physics package.
 
Forest Green said:
...which depends on very expensive materials.
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Haven't they already been paid for? Remember that the 1950s and 1960s there was a massive expansion of the US nuclear-arsenal which has subsequently been shrunk to a small fraction of its original size. The result is that the PANTEX plant at Amarillo, Texas and the Y-12 facility at Oakridge, Tennessee have literally thousands of pits and secondaries in long-term storage, that is a LOT of surplus Oralloy, weapons-grade Pu-239 and Li6D available to be recycled and reused in new nuclear warheads.
 
Forest Green said:
Given the cost of the materials in the physics package, probably quite a bit. Tritium is only marginally less expensive than diamond per gram and the fission fuel, while an order of magnitude less, is still more expensive than gold by two orders of magnitude.
brightside.me

The 12 Most Expensive Materials In The World

For many centuries, lots of people have believed that gold is one of the most expensive materials in the world. This, however, is absolutely wrong.
brightside.me brightside.me
Click to expand...
Oh, right.

Does any modern nuke still use Tritium? I thought they were all 6LiD for the fusion fuel?
 
Scott Kenny said:
Does any modern nuke still use Tritium?
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Yes, it is mixed with Deuterium form the DT-gas mixture used for hollow-boosting the primary and the way modern primaries are designed it is critical as an unbolted primary will only yield 0.3KT before disassembly.

Scott Kenny said:
I thought they were all 6LiD for the fusion fuel?
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The Li6D is used as the fusion fuel in the secondary.
 
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Scott Kenny said:
Oh, right.

Does any modern nuke still use Tritium? I thought they were all 6LiD for the fusion fuel?
Click to expand...

Tritium is typically injected into the primary as a booster to increase efficiency of the first stage. I had thought this still common in US warheads, with the teitium bottle having to be refilled periodically.
 
Josh_TN said:
Tritium is typically injected into the primary as a booster to increase efficiency of the first stage.
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It's a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium and with modern primaries it's not about increasing the pit's efficiency but reducing the amount of HE used to compress it making for a smaller and lighter warhead. Without the DT boost the primary only yields 0.3KT which also has effect of making it safer too.

Josh_TN said:
I had thought this still common in US warheads, with the teitium bottle having to be refilled periodically.
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It still is periodically refilled (Tritium has a half-life of 12.32 years).
 
The Times (Irish editon), January 21st 2024

Kim dodges sanctions to gain nuclear weapons tool

North Korea
Richard Lloyd Parray Asia Editor


North Korea obtained a key tool used in the production of nuclear warheads by shipping it through three separate countries in an elaborate ploy to dodge international sanctions on its weapons programme.

According to a US think tank, the authorities in Mexico, South Africa and China failed to spot false documentation for a vacuum furnace, which can be used in creating fuel for nuclear warheads. The case demonstrates the increasing difficulties of enforcing international sanctions against North Korea.

The report by the Institute for Science and International Security cites unnamed government sources to describe an incident in 2022, when the vacuum furnace was shipped from Spain with an accurate description of its function.

Such equipment is designated "dual use" under UN sanctions, meaning that while it has legitimate civilian uses, it also has an important function in Kim Jong-un's nuclear weapons program and is banned for export to North Korea.

"This type of furnace is a mainstay of a nuclear-weapons program, particularly one that uses weapon-grade uranium as the nuclear explosive material, as North Korea is known to do," David Albright, a physicist and former weapons inspector, said in the report. "With North Korea expanding its uranium-enrichment program and producing greater quantities of weapon-grade uranium, this new furnace would be especially important."

The shipment arrived in Mexico, where it was given a new code under the "harmonised system" used internationally to label traded items. Listed under the general term "machinery", it was then shipped to South Africa where it was redesignated as scrap metal and sent to China, from where it passed to North Korea.

Although Beijing agreed to sanctions against North Korea passed by the UN security council, it has become lenient about enforcing them as relations with the West have deteriorated.

The think tank called for "additional scrutiny" for such exports to China.

The report comes as the governments of the US, Japan and South Korea said North Korean hackers had stolen more than $600 million in cryptocurrency in 2023, which could fund its nuclear programme.

In a joint statement last week, the countries said that Pyongyang's cyber programmes posed a threat "to the international community" and "the intergrity and stability of the international financial system".

They added: "The three governments are working together to prevent North Korea's theft of private sector and others and to recover the stolen funds, with the ultimate goal of blocking the illicit proceeds used for North Korea's illicit WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and ballistic-missile programmes."

The governments also warned of the threat of North Korean IT workers impersonating Japanese citizens to get remote work in overseas companies, with their income channelled to the regime. In 2023, the UN estimated as many as 10,000 North Korean IT experts worked overseas.
 
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