I just wanted to add some context for one of these bullets.
The US is upping the amount it spends on nuclear weapons maintenance and production because China has reentered the game as a major player. They’d been stable at 300-350 warheads for decades but is expected to ramp up to producing 100+ per year by 2030.
So one major adversary has just been replaced by another. Everything old is new again, including the cold war arms race.
Reprocessing of old pits.
It’s more a matter of precision, purity, infrastructure, and staffing.
And you can have them effective/guaranteed to work, safe/without personnel or environmental contamination, or cheap. Pick two.