The Guardian released an article about the GAE’s lack of nuclear weapons readiness. It waffled all over the place and bent every number it included. One part did jump out at me:

In 2018, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) produced a plan to meet the defense department’s goal of 80 pits a year by maximizing production lines at Los Alamos and converting a plant near the Savannah River in South Carolina originally built to dispose of 34 tons of cold war-era plutonium deemed unneeded by nuclear weapons programs . But the project was unsuccessful and cancelled in 2020.

According to the Scientific American report, the first 800 new pits would go to the Sentinel program, and then all 1,900 US submarine-launched missiles would be refreshed. The new warheads would also be shock-resistant, or “insensitive” to accidental detonation that could disperse plutonium.

But there is now no pit-production expertise at the South Carolina facility and cost estimates have already grown from $3.6bn to over $11bn for a third fewer pits. In January, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) warned that the NNSA’s plutonium modernization program had not developed “either a comprehensive schedule or a cost estimate that meets GAO best practices”.

All of this coming on what Military Times deemed a crisis over a decade ago in a field that has been steadily sliding since the 1990s. The admission there is no plan and, more importantly, no expertise in the very technical engineering area dovetails with what I have observed and what I’ve been saying for some time now. Tom Ironsides even specifically addressed this issue regarding SRS/P in THE SUBSTITUTE.

As the decline of all things truly becomes terminal, the GAE will slowly drop out of the nuclear arena. With the GAO now admitting the lack of competence and expertise it is likely that the empire has passed the necessary generational skills gap meaning those who knew how to make and use tritium and reforge plutonium cores are no longer around to explain the process to those who do not know. The very good news is that in the unlikely event of a nuclear exchange, the GAE’s participation will be severely limited in the near future and practically impossible in a decade or so.