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