How do you know the tritium would be viable as an explosive after reentry?
First, tritium is not an "explosive."
Second, you determine the viability of a warhead by subjecting it on the ground to the same effects it would experience in flight. I asked you some time ago to tell me what unknown forces it would experience in flight that we couldn't duplicate well enough on the ground. Why haven't you told us? It's rather important to your case, if you're going to claim that all-up testing is the only effective method.
A heat shield/barrier must protect the bomb as it reenters. How would you know that the device worked, the protection worked, without actually flying it through the atmosphere?
The same way we know any device will work in its intended environment without subjecting it irretrievably and inscrutably to that environment. We apply our engineering knowledge base to determine qualitatively what the effects will be. We quantify those effects through models derived from the science and verified by a small number of instrument flights. Then we apply the affects to a test article.
A live missile, live tritium, only way to tell.
No, it's the
worst way to tell. If the warhead fails to detonate (either because it broke or because you didn't arm it), you may never find it. And the forces it suffered in its uncharacteristic impact with the ocean or the ground may mask anything that you would learn by a forensic disassembly. Further, your enemy may get to the warhead before you do!
If, on the other hand, the warhead detonates, it vaporizes any and all evidence of its performance. Engineers are interested in far more about the performance of a warhead than simply whether it goes boom. Let's say your warhead survived its plunge through the atmosphere and detonates. By what margin did it survive? 10 percent? 0.01 percent? How would you know whether you're operating safely, or on the razor's edge of failure?
You say we should instrument the warhead to tell us. That would work, because it's the numbers from the instruments that we'd be interested in. And in that case you leave out the
nuclear material, since you're not going to react it. Do you have any idea how much that stuff costs? How difficult it is to produce?
And so we've come down to what we
actually do. We fly instrument packages -- warhead frames packed with instruments instead of tritium. That lets us know that what we're doing on the ground in shake tables, vacuum chambers, and so forth is actually testing the warhead in a meaningful way.
You would have to do it over and over and over again......
No, that's exactly the
opposite of the point of aerospace flight test.
