[CurlyDave]

You don't "refurbish" an atomic trigger.

I was actually referring to refurbishing the entire bomb.

This would include replacing any parts which have expired due to nuclear decay, any damaged by the radiation environment, and any which are unreliable just due to age.

My point was & still is, that even with an expired nuke you still have known good fissile material and a known good design. Making one of these workable again is much easier that starting from scratch.

The other noteworthy aspect is that it may be possible to trade some of the non-working devices to a nation seeking nuclear capability in return for technical assistance with the remaining ones. This gets around the notion of bringing a horde of barbarian warriors up to the technical level necessary to maintain a nuke.

The nation make choose to rebuild them or extract the fissile material and make a larger weapon of its own design.

[Iberian]

Are you saying that a new battery can do it??. Just kidding, you make a very good point.

The suitcases have been out there, compliments of Putins henchmen and the paranoyd crowd before him.

[Southack]

"My point was & still is, that even with an expired nuke you still have known good fissile material and a known good design. Making one of these workable again is much easier that starting from scratch."

I would argue that it is actually easier to start from scratch if the nuke has gone more than 6 months without laboratory-style clean-room maintenance.

You've got rust on your fissionable core and in your shell/case (uranium and plutonium attract rust rapidly). You've got radiation that has deteriorated your various electrical connections and components over that period of time. You've got radiation that has affected your conventional explosives. You've got terribly brittle metals that will have microscopic shatters affecting the ability of the shape to form everything just right for a chain-reaction blast (and that's if the amatuers involved are able to know -and act on- how to transport such devices with a minimum of micro-vibrations); ditto for the natural radioactive decay that creates "impurities" for lack of a better word in random places in what you wish to be a pristinely pure core and shell/case.

Reshaping your fissionable core alone is a metal-worker's nightmare (it's hyper-brittle, rusts if it touches much air, has hyper-toxic dust, etc.), and you have to reshape your core if you get rust in it, or if you get a micro-shatter, or if the natural radioactive decay has altered the "dependable" shape of your warhead's design.

Just look at how few socieities can currently do competent metal work for jumbo-jet wing assemblies, then divide that number by some ratio to arrive at an even smaller subset of *nations* who can cobble together the teams capable of reshaping a heavy metal atomic core that has either rust or natural decay or fractures in it.

These are *non* trivial technical hurdles. In world history fewer than a dozen *nations* have managed to overcome such difficulties, and only one of those countries was capable of doing it all from scratch (everyone else stole or borrowed technical know-how and/or personnel).

Consider that for the nuclear math alone, the distinguished German scientist Heisenberg got it wrong. We still credit him with the atomic Heisenberg's Uncertainly Principle to this day, so he was rather brilliant...just not up to this particular challenge.