I mean, when was the last time any military minion had to prove the nukes worked or even exist anymore? It was all a long time ago and in a very different environment. As we know here in the West, what doesn't get cycled and greased doesn't work on demand.
Did they even try to modify their modern rockets and missiles for tactical delivery over the last 50 years or did their scientists, engineers and bureaucrats merely "report that they had done the work?"
It's not an idle question. Even our vaunted Air Force mismanaged nuclear weapons on a massive scale after the Cold War ended and they stood down the Strategic Air Command and turned the oversight and management of our nuclear arsenal to idiots, morons and yes men who lost God only knows how many nuclear weapons.
The men charged with the development, production, storage, use and oversight of our nuclear arsenal were typical of the generation of scientists, engineers and management that put men on the moon in 1969. All those men are gone and the processes so long disused are all but forgotten now. You only have to look at the dismal Boeing Company and all of its divisions. It's vaunted aircraft division used to produce the best and most reliable commercial aircraft in the world and then Management decided to retire to Chicago and the money men running the company no longer had any input from their designers, pilots, mechanics, engineers, etc and it was soon reflected in the disastrous new 737. The 787 suffers from a design flaw that leads to solar radiation despoiling the paint on the tops of the aircraft that they now have to hold on with duct tape. It's not a surprise given that some call it speed tape.
Their space division is just a calamity and a disaster that will almost certainly happen if Artemis ever does launch. It's 5 years and billion of $ over cost and just got rolled back to the hanger for the 3rd or 4th time. NASA administrators have nonetheless not changed the planned deployment of the catastrophe and they will give Artemis one unmanned test flight around the moon on it's first mission and the second will be a manned mission to the moon. I think they are mad.
People are really sneering at the poor Russian military which is losing to 'plucky' little Ukraine. The Russians are not fighting Ukraine and haven't since the invasion. NATO has dumped enormous numbers of weapons into Ukraine and its new technical hands (hi-tech mercenaries from NATO forces). And let us not forget the utter fiasco of our running away from Afghanistan which was completely overrun by the Taliban even before the Army finished running away.
As I've said before, I'm glad my family no longer lives in the strategic targets of the Cold War. I mean, you don't really think the Russians would nuke McLean, VA do you? Half the people working there in the CIA Headquarters are Russian and Chinese agents.
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Russia has about 5000 nuclear devices. If only 10% of them actually work that's still more than enough to destroy modern civilization and send society back a couple millenia. And if they launch WE launch....that would be at least hundreds more warheads. Nope. Just ONE warhead would lead to a chain reaction of escalation leading to TEOTWAWKI.
Only one has to work.
No upside to assuming that the Russian's nukes won't work. We are being led by morons who delude themselves into thinking that everyone is as stupid as they are and that they will eventually end up winning. Because they've always "won." They haven't been hit over the head enough to realize that things can go sideways at the drop of a hat.
I am thinking that when the horns blow a warning of nukes incoming, some smart men and women will shut to vault doors before the politicians can get to them.
For me, I see Buckley AFB and NSA comms site out the back door of my home. I certainly can't afford to move, so. I've got a law chair bolted to the roof, and a cooler filled with cold snacks and a beer just in case it all goes out in a flash. I plan to enjoy at least 100ms of the best fireworks the Kremlin ever invested in.
I know I sound a bit negative, but I'm a realist in my old age...
You can only blame NASA so much for the Artemis program. Congress holds the purse strings and continues to put riders on their budgets.
Your comments about Boeing could have been shortened to 'The beancounters took over the company from the engineers and everything turned into shit.'
The idea as I understand it is that Putin will lob one over Kiev and call it a day. If it fails to go off or squibs then he'll be more than embarrassed. The whole point of a nuclear weapon program from the 40s on was to demonstrate "superpower". If it doesn't work and just rains down a little plutonium or enriched uranium, well, the Ukrainians saw that already when they slagged one of the reactors at Chernobyl. If you go to the matts and pull out your last stop, it has to work or be seen to work or it's all over.
Remember when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called his counterpart in China to let him know that if Trump ordered a nuclear launch (something that Trump never even breathed about much less blustered and threatened?) I sure hope the dim bulbs left in charge in the Pentagon and NSC have been going through the motions very very carefully so when the call comes in at 2 am, the button mashers are forced to act rashly at a moment's notice. It will have been practiced a hundred times and every critical watchstander will go through every link of the detonation chain step by step a number of times so nobody gets to "lash out" at Russians for incinerating a thing that is most definitely not a vital interest of OURS.
NASA is the ultimate fail upward organization on this planet. The Artemis program is anything but starved for cash. It is the abysmal management and engineering with a little bit of Congress who directed maximum reuse of Shuttle program stuff. Boeing could have designed and built one but they lowballed it and won the bid and having one porked out every single bit of it to ensure all States were behind them in providing necessary expensive over-priced obsolete hardware and software.
There is a great article in The Atlantic from a year or two ago talking about the Fiasco of Boeing after it merged with McDonnell-Douglas and moved corporate from Seattle to Chicago. It made the point that Boeing had the best management/engineering/manufacturing team in the world and then all of a sudden started doing things the McDonnell-Douglas stupid way. It shows.
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