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GEOPOLITICS NUCLEAR BALANCE OF POWER William Spaniel: Is Russia's Nuclear Weapons Arsenal Broken? Original article: Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess
Is Russia's Nuclear Weapons Arsenal Broken? William Spaniel Aug 31, 2024 648K subscribers ... 522,523 views ... 21K likes Check out my book 'How Ukraine Survived': https://amzn.to/47gnlEf . You can also read it for free by signing up for a Kindle Unlimited trial at https://amzn.to/3QMsBr8 . (I use affiliate links, meaning I earn a commission when you make a transaction through them. Even if you read for free, you are still supporting the channel.) One of the underlying themes of the War in Ukraine is U.S. reticence to fully commit to the fight due to Russian nuclear weapons. However, is it possible that this a phantom menace? Could Russia’s arsenal be beyond a state of repair? This video explores the arguments for why the threat may be empty, and whether they hold any weight under scrutiny. 0:00 Skepticism about Russia’s Nuclear Arsenal 1:07 Basic Nuclear Weapons Maintenance 5:55 Is Russia Incapable of Maintaining Nuclear Weapons? 8:50 Why Russia Is Probably Capable 11:36 Corruption 13:02 Why the West Should Not Bank on Corruption 16:40 Strategic Decay The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. Media licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... By IAEA Imagebank: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tenness... https://www.flickr.com/photos/iaea_im... Media licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... By Khamenei.ir: https://farsi.khamenei.ir/photo-album... 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Why Russia's Nuclear Weapons Failed to Deter Ukraine's Invasion ... by William Spaniel Why Russia Miscalculated in Ukraine: A Self-Inflicted Disaster in Three Acts ... by William Spaniel Transcript Skepticism about Russia’s Nuclear Arsenal 0:00 One of the underlying themes of the War in Ukraine is U.S. reticence to fully commit to the fight due to Russian nuclear weapons. Certainly we have spent a bunch of time on it. Heck, this one on nukes failing to deter was from just a few weeks ago. But one thing we have not yet discussed is a more basic question: will the silly things even work? Many of you have your doubts, but you lean toward them mostly being okay. So, today, let’s try to figure it out. We will start with the basic problems that all countries have with nuclear maintenance and then analyze and critique three reasons why Russia might be struggling with the upkeep: first, the literal inability to handle the problem, second, corruption and graft within the Russian military ranks, and finally a more general strategic reason why you might intentionally let your nuclear weapons decay. Oh, and you will definitely want to stay until the 1:02 end because that one is a literal textbook lines on maps problem. Basic Nuclear Weapons Maintenance But we start with the basic need for nuclear weapons maintenance. You might recall from that most recent foray on the subject that Russia is the largest nuclear weapons power at just under 5600 total bombs. About 1700 of them are supposed to be ready to go, 2700 are in storage and could be made ready in short order, and 1200 are being phased out but could potentially be brought back into the fold. You may also recall that Russia’s arsenal is split into both the big strategic bombs meant to destroy cities, and about a thousand are tactical nuclear weapons that tend to be smaller and are meant for battlefield use. However, the problem for any nuclear weapons state is that you cannot just build them once and expect them to last for decades. 2:00 You see, nuclear weapons are very precise devices, with thousands of components. A vast majority of them are critical to the explosive process. If a single one of those malfunctions, you will not get the big boom that you desire. For example, take the common implosion design. Here, you begin a core of weapons-grade plutonium. Thankfully, it does not immediately explode in its normal state. Someone help me bring it back. Thank you. Rather, for the chain reaction to begin, you need to make the core denser. Then you get the explosion. The basic idea is that you need neutrons to hit those fissile plutonium atoms, and that is easier when everything is closer together. The way a nuclear weapon does that is first by constructing a shell, and then lining it with conventional explosives all around the sphere, and all aimed inward. The plutonium pit then goes inside. When you are ready, the conventional explosions all 3:01 go off at the exact same time, the pit condenses, and you get your mushroom cloud. The problem is that when I said the exact same time, I meant the exact same time. Going back to the diagram, if you are off by even just a bit, the pit flattens into a pancake. That increases surface area to volume, which has the opposite effect of what you want. Neutrons instead become more likely to escape into the universe, rather than hit that sweet, sweet plutonium. Moreover, this is a particularly weak point for Russia. Many suspect that the Russian manufacturing process struggles with the creation of the pit. The issue, in theory, does not doom the entire system. Rather, the pits need to be replaced every ten to fifteen years. That would mean, at minimum, every nuclear weapon in Russia’s arsenal should have 4:00 gone through two if not three refurbishing processes since the fall of the Soviet Union. But it gets more complicated. If you want an efficient nuclear weapon, you have to add another layer to this by putting a pit of hydrogen inside the plutonium. Now, that hydrogen is actually a mixture of deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is the hydrogen isotope with two nucleons in its nucleus, hence the prefix “deu”. Tritium, meanwhile, is the isotope with three nucleons, hence the prefix “tri”. Both also have one electron. Ordinarily, deuterium and tritium do not like each other much. But expose them to immense heat—say, that of a nuclear blast— and suddenly they want to become best friends. In doing so, they combine together to form helium. This specific form of helium has two protons, two neutrons, and two electrons. If we check our math real quick, we will see that, yep, 5:02 there is an excess neutron left over here, all by itself. Why does this matter? Well, going back to our regular bomb, recall that the chain reaction happens because the condensed pit increases the chances that a neutron hits an atom of plutonium and thereby causes further fission. The deuterium-tritium reaction saves a step by just unleashing massive numbers of neutrons directly into the target area. That increases the efficiency of the weapon, allowing you to miniaturize the design while still producing the desired yield. The complication here is that tritium has a half-life of about 12.5 years. As a result, you may need to cycle out your tritium every five to ten to keep the bombs working properly. That would mean that Russia would be on its third rotation there at minimum. Is Russia Incapable of Maintaining Nuclear Weapons? Okay, so that is the problem in broad strokes. Let’s switch to looking at reasons that Russia’s nuclear arsenal may no longer work, beginning with inability. 6:06 This concern could be subdivided into financial and technical limitations. On the financial side, there is a perception that the primary cost of nuclear weapons is in the development cycle. However, that is inaccurate. Focusing on the United States, because we do not exactly have reliable estimates for Russia, the Manhattan Project cost $51 billion. But through 1996, the United States had spent $821 billion on keeping its bombs functional. Part of this is the expansion of its arsenal—keep in mind that the United States once possessed an absurdly large number of nuclear weapons. But much of it also went to ensuring that what it had actually worked properly. To get a taste of how the numbers can run up so quickly, tritium costs about $30,000 per gram. 7:02 By comparison, that is about the weight of a paperclip. Now, an average weapon might require a little more three grams of tritium. So at least every ten years, Russia needs to spend about $100,000 per tritium boosted nuclear weapon, and just for the tritium. Remember, though, nuclear weapons have thousands of parts, as do the systems that they are connected to. And while graciously tritium is more expensive to maintain than the vast majority of them, you can see how this adds up. That was the financial part. The other half is sheer ability. Concerns here usually stem from the breakdown of Russia’s education system after the Soviet Union dissolved. Think about the 30 year olds at the time. They are final cohort of Soviets who received advanced degrees. Well, they are now in their 60s, meaning that they are hitting retirement age. 8:01 Oh, and as if to further troll the Kremlin, their retirement is also exacerbating the financial problem by squeezing the Russian pension program. But returning to capacity, if you think that the knowledge of that cohort has not been passed down to others, then Russia’s program might be in trouble. It does not help that Russia has never tested a nuclear weapon. The last Russia-affiliated test occurred in 1990, still under the Soviet banner. And, as a gentle reminder, poorly-monitored AI is still dumb: the largest Soviet test did not occur on October 24, 1990. It occurred in 1961, and that is an abundantly easy fact to check. I am not sure if this silly picture makes up for that. Why Russia Is Probably Capable In any case, there are many reasons to think that capacity is not an issue. Let’s stick with the pure ability part for a second. In the absence of a proper nuclear weapons test, 9:02 we can gauge nuclear science ability in the country more generally with power plant operation. Russia has a ton of them, and they still work just fine. A lot of them may be on the end of their life cycles, and some of them are nearby invading Ukrainian soldiers, but if we are worried about what is happening right now, knowledge does not seem to be an issue. Even the more technical parts are not an obvious problem. Russia appears to still have a nuclear reactor capable of producing tritium. And even if it did not, the Soviet Union bequeathed Russia 30,000 bombs. You see, tritium has gone through about three half life cycles since then, and it is possible to remove tritium from the weapons, purify it so all of the half life junk is gone, and insert the tritium back into a weapon. Well, take 30,000 divide it by 2, divide that by 2, and divide that by 2 and the result is 3750. 10:03 Thus, what is leftover is enough to fuel a majority of Russia’s current weapons. Now, those are rough calculations, not accounting for the types of weapons. The fact is, I do not have perfect intelligence of what is happening there. The point is, though, that there is still plenty of tritium to be had in Russia. Is there a loss of institutional knowledge? Sure. But that is true for everyone—for example, American officers are unlikely to be familiar with these kinds of fallout timetables. And keep in mind that tritium is not necessary for a weapon. It just boosts the outcome of an already-exploding bomb. So, even if the tritium is all gone, that does not fully solve the problem. Okay, that is the ability part. What about the finances? Well, corners certainly had to be cut on the federal budget, especially during the transition period and before the surge in energy exports that Russia would later enjoy. 11:03 But during that period, Russia prioritized its nuclear weapons arsenal. So, if anything, it was in good shape compared to the rest of the armed forces. Moreover, hundreds of millions of dollars in upkeep sounds like a lot of money, but it is manageable for a large country’s budget. However, that assumes that all of the money intended for the program actually goes into the program— because, to the average person, hundreds of millions sounds like quite a lot. Corruption And that takes us to the second concern: corruption. This is a more serious problem. In fact, the reason the war began and continues at all is in part due to corruption. The Kremlin believed that the invasion would be easy, and that Russian forces would quickly overpower an outmatched Ukrainian army. Kyiv was skeptical, on the other hand, especially regarding the status of Russian forces. 12:03 That led to the Kremlin’s initial miscalculation that drove the war. Then Russia got bogged down during its invasion of Kyiv. It turns out that selling your vehicle’s protective armor plating as scrap metal is not conducive to survival. Nor is siphoning the petrol in your vehicle to sell on the black market conducive to arriving on time at the capital. Hence Kyiv survived. If that type of corruption filtered up to the nuclear level, Russia may be unable to atomically escalate even if it wanted to. A connected problem is with Russia’s delivery systems. Nuclear weapons that can go boom still are not helpful if they never arrive on the opponent’s soil. The beginning of the war also raised an issue here. The DoD indicated that Russia’s various missile systems experienced a 20 to 60 percent failure rate. Similar numbers would not be reassuring when the payload is radioactive. Why the West Should Not Bank on Corruption 13:03 Again, though, this possibility should not put anyone in the West at ease. You see, nuclear weapons are not subject to the same corruption issues as the rest of the Russian military. As a starting point, those corruption issues became evident to the Kremlin more than two years ago. Although Russia has not fixed them all, the government has taken steps to improve the situation. But let’s imagine that the Kremlin has not applied any of those extra precautions to the nuclear field. Well, one of the reasons that autocrats find nuclear weapons attractive in the first place is that the process is concentrated into relatively few hands. For a comparison, think about how difficult it is to confirm that your army is ready to launch an offensive. To do a thorough job, you have to check tens of thousands of pieces of equipment one-by-one. You cannot just examine a single vehicle 14:00 and expect that to get you anywhere with your military plans. And even if you audit a ton of them, you must still worry that your lieutenants are not showing you a representative sample. Their title even warns you of the problem. But this auditing issue is not a problem for a one-off nuclear explosion. If you are confident that the bomb will do its job, then that is the end of it. So, yes, corruption may still happen along the nuclear supply chain. But catching it is easier. And certainly when you are at the point where you want to fire the silly thing, you can double check all its vital components. Put another way, you cannot naively apply that 20 to 60 percent missile failure rate from earlier to nuclear weapons. You see, there is not much concern for any country, Russia or otherwise, about whether a single conventional missile fails. Each one is expensive, yes, but it is not a national scandal if it blows up early. 15:03 However, the same cannot be said when the payload is nuclear. Also, that 20 to 60 percent failure rate included missiles that missed their targets. But as the saying goes, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons. In any case, let’s suppose that the corruption is extremely bad, and only a fifth of Russia’s nuclear weapons work. Well, what do you call it when a nuclear weapon explodes over Berlin? Answer: a bad day. What do you call it when a nuclear weapon explodes over Rome but four fail to ignite? I do not know about you, but I would still call that a bad day. I also cannot speak for historians, but I suspect that second part would go down as a footnote in the textbooks, and readers skip those anyway. To draw an analogy, it would be like playing Russian roulette, which is something that anyone with three grams of self-preservation tries to avoid. Heck, 16:04 even if 90% of Russia’s 5580 nuclear weapons do not work, what is left is still larger than China’s entire arsenal. But exiting the casino for a second, that is actually one of the reasons why both Russia and the United States keep their stockpiles so large: redundancy is an insurance policy. The upshot for the West is that an attempt to wipe out the entire U.S. arsenal in a first strike does require accuracy and confidence that each nuke will work, but that is not the concern at the moment… Strategic Decay 16:40 Finally, let’s talk about strategic decay. Strangely, it is a perfectly reasonable decision to not keep your nuclear weapons in good condition. The problem here is verifiability. It is hard to know whether your opponent has maintained its arsenal or not. And that in turn gives rise to bluffing behaviors, the calling of perceived bluffs, 17:03 and potentially war. And now the moment that we have all been waiting for: Let’s go to the lines on maps! Imagine a world where a nuclear power dutifully refreshed its weapons. Well, as any long-time viewer knows, when you try settling your political differences, negotiated agreements must be commensurate with the balance of military power. Nuclear weapons grant you some of that military power. And if everyone knows you that dutifully maintain your weapons, then they will not think of you as a weakling like this. Rather, they will recognize that military outcomes are more favorable to you, and so you can reap the benefits accordingly. But then one day one of your military advisors gets clever. He points out that everyone thinks that you maintain your arsenal. And due to a malfunction in my animation procedures, he is pulsating very angrily about it. The thing is, though, no one can actually verify that you maintain everything. It is just a belief. 18:04 Further, because he watched the first half of this video, he also points out that maintaining the arsenal is very expensive. So he recommends that you just stop paying for the upkeep. And that suggestion could not come at a better time: your conventional military in Ukraine is draining your budget anyway. You don’t tell anyone about the cutbacks, of course, and so you get the best of both worlds: coercive leverage predicated on you having nuclear weapons but not having to pay a dime to do it. Of course, a clever advisor on the opposite side might point out that the nuclear power would have this exact incentive to bluff, and therefore they should not be sure whether they are facing a fully-functional nuclear adversary or not. It’s a puzzle… Well, fortunately, the lines on maps professionals have worked through this scenario. 19:01 Sure enough, the nuclear state sometimes should lean toward the bluff—but it ought not assuredly do so, otherwise everyone would know that it is a paper tiger. Meanwhile, the opposing state must sometimes call what it thinks might be a bluff by holding firm on its demands, and treating the opponent like it does not have nuclear weapons. This has the unfortunate effect of leading to conflict when the nuclear state did properly maintain its arsenal. Yikes! And less reassuringly, the probability of war increases as the cost of maintenance increases. The logic here is that the more costly it is to not cheat the system, the more tempting it is to bluff, and thus the opposing state has to be more proactive in calling those possible bluffs. On the bright side, extremely high costs eventually invalidate the problem. Indeed, when the costs exceed the value of the additional military strength, then everyone knows that the nuclear power would abandon the program entirely at that point. 20:04 Let me clarify this logic with some lines. Visually, even if maintaining the arsenal extends your power out to here, you would not do it if the cost effectively pushed back this far. In turn, the opponent can infer that the weapons program has been abandoned, and adjust its offer to avoid war accordingly. That is, everyone understands that the power distribution is here, and so the settlement occurs somewhere around there. But even in the case where conflict does break out, that does not mean that we will inherently jump to a nuclear war. It might just force Russia’s hand into testing some nuclear weapons to eliminate Washington’s doubts. In any case, the observable U.S. reticence tells us something here. Its intel analysts—who have more to go from than us Internet warriors—believe that Russia is capable, or, alternatively, that the underlying preferences in the White House are extremely risk adverse. 21:04 But whatever is the driver, at least for the moment, we are not yet walking down a path of nuclear annihilation. Meanwhile, if you are worried about nuclear annihilation, might I suggest the paperback copies of my books on the war? They will resist electromagnetic pulses much better than the Ebola will. You know what, autocorrect refuses to acknowledge that “ebooks” is a word, so I am just going to go with it. Ebola! Check the video description for more information about them And if you enjoyed this video, please like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Take care.

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