Or someone who knows how to do it will retire. Lots of little companies end up in trouble because of this, and sometimes over trivial procedures that turn out to be more important than you think. And some not so little companies, with some no so trivial procedures. From March 9, 2009 Fox News:
The Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration had to wait more than a year to refurbish aging nuclear warheads — partly because they had forgotten how to make a crucial component, a government report states.
Regarding a classified material codenamed "Fogbank," a Government Accountability Office report released this month states that "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency."
So the effort to refurbish and upgrade W76 warheads, which top the U.S. Navy's (and the British Royal Navy's) submarine-launched Trident missiles, had to be put on hold while experts scoured old records and finally figured out how to manufacture the stuff once again.
According to the Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, Fogbank is "thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear [hydrogen] bomb."
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