An operation by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) has hit “more than 40” Russian bombers at air bases “in the rear of the Russian Federation,” a source in the agency told the Kyiv Independent on June 1.
“Enemy strategic bombers are burning en masse in Russia — this is the result of a special operation by the SBU,” the source said.
Video provided by the source shows what appears to be a row of heavy bomber aircraft on fire at an undisclosed location.
With the warheads its not an engineering issue, the fissile material simply stops being viable after a while and you can’t engineer around that, so the question is less about quality and more about if anyone ever replaced that stuff, or if it was replaced if that fissile material was of high enough quality and not say, a block of wood and a new yacht.
Not to mention the high explosives used to trigger nuclear chain reactions degrades over time as well. There are lots of parts to a nuclear weapon that must be regularly maintained/replaced for the weapon to remain viable.