Folks should understand that nukes need maintenance. They’re not like a conventional bomb, where if you keep it in a cool, dry area, the explosive material within the bomb will last for decades (or more) without any attention. Nukes are bombs with a shelf life. The fissile materials within them decay, and after a number of years, need to be refreshed or replaced with fresh material. An example of such a material is tritium - many of you might use night-sights on your handguns or such you’d use in home defense or on-duty carry for LEO’s. Well, those little glowing inserts fade in a few years, and that’s a result of the 12.7 year half-life of the tritium. Other components become poisoned by the decay of the fissile material and need to be changed out.
If this isn’t done, the result could be what nuke physics jocks call a “fizzle” - the nuke reaction starts, then peters out well short of potential yields as the nuclear chain reaction fails to take off properly.
Given that there’s only so much of this materials to go around, it behooves us to update/refresh the weapons we’re most likely to use. A bomb intended to be lugged around the world in 1950’s doctrine manned bombers obviously isn’t high on the priority list of weapons and delivery systems to be used in first strikes today.
I’m hardly an Obama supporter, but I think that the disassembly of weapons that are obsolete to current strategic doctrine shouldn’t be seen as some sort of conspiracy by Obama’s buddies. The fiscal and engineering issues have been talked about in engineering journals for years - how are we going to maintain the thousands of warheads we have in inventory? It is a problem that was first discussed in the mid-90’s.
This resulted in something called the “Science Based Stockpile Stewardship” idea within the LBL and LANL weapons groups, which then tied in with the Bush administration’s “Nuclear Posture Review” in 2002, both of which call for reductions in the US weapons stockpile over the 10 years following 2002. Basically, if you want to complain about the reduction or decommissioning of nukes at this point, we have to look back at the Bush Administration as the source of the policy.
That makes me wonder about the readiness of Russia's ICBM fleet. They haven't much money to spread around to maintain their military. How much of it went to ICBM/warhead maintenance would be interesting to know.