“Can’t they refresh the nuclear charge as part of normal maintenance?”
The purpose of nuclear testing was to determine, among other things, what had to be maintained and what didn’t. I suspect that one ongoing problem is that working with nukes is dangerous and expensive. It requires specialized buildings and industries and does not create enough cash to keep those industries in business. What do you do if you’re a specialized worker and you only see a nuke to work on once in a long while?
I don’t know this for a fact, but working for the government defense business I strongly suspect that the support infrastructure in most countries has been allowed to decay and vanish. Think of the fate of the SR-71, the fastest, and as it turns out, most useful intel tool of all time. To save a mere $28 million dollars, Clinton cancelled the funding for the support infrastructure. When they discovered they simply had to have those planes they took one from a museum and recalled retired workers and a pilot from the civilian world. I never saw the final figure, but you can bet it took way more than the $28 million that Clinton “saved.”
This is the short term thinking of liberals everywhere, as the last objective of liberalism is to protect the state. I’d lay money that the French nukes are decaying and have not been refreshed in a decade or more.
(U) I saw some radar data from a French SLBM launch, from the Bay of Biscay to French “territorial” waters south of Newfoundland. French missiles and deployment systems seem to work superbly.