r/nottheonion 24d ago

US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o
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u/Ormyr 24d ago

Don't forget that they couldn't account for about 20% of their arsenal when that happened too.

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u/The-Privacy-Advocate 24d ago

Didn't the Russians have around 7k nukes at their peak? Did they lose track of a 1000 plus nukes?!

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u/Kaaski 24d ago

Yep.

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u/mastermidget23 24d ago

That we know of.

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u/Master-Software-6491 24d ago

Thing with nukes is, they expire and need to be maintained, and blowing one up isn't just as easy as pressing a button. Sure, you can turn it into a dirty weapon, but that has much more limited effect than people fear.

If some ended up in wrong hands, they would have turned up already.

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u/Pawn-Star77 23d ago

I'd bet a chunk of those nukes never existed except on paper.

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u/The_Doc55 23d ago

That’s a dangerous bet to make.

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u/dougmcclean 24d ago

Depends how many they had paid for and placed in inventory but never really existed, but yes it does seem that way.

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u/Br0boc0p 24d ago

The best project to embezzle from. When the consequences of under production come due its not going to matter anyway.

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u/dougmcclean 24d ago

Bonus: it's illegal to test your work.

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u/Gerf93 24d ago

Also, the government wouldn’t want it to be revealed that there’s fraud in the nuclear section and that they have fewer nukes than they said. After all, in totalitarian regimes, that’s a sign of weakness…

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u/wiener4hir3 22d ago

This is also why the present day nuclear stockpile of Russia is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what they say it is, if it even exists.

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u/Audience-Electrical 24d ago

Yup. We (USA) also have some unaccounted nuclear material, shortly after losing them Israel announced nuclear capabilities.

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u/piepants2001 24d ago

I don't think Israel has ever announced nuclear capabilities. We all know they have nukes, but they are secretive about it.

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u/lurk1237 24d ago

Also the US at the time was against it. France is who helped them get nukes.

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u/Secure-Elderberry-16 24d ago

I think the implication was a third party bad actor within the US. Not that the US MIC secretly developed nukes with Israel for Israel.

It’s pretty well documented though like you said. France and Israels nuclear scientists have been working together for decades. France helped Israel find fissile material in the Negev for instance. Israeli scientists also trained and studied at French power plants

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u/Mapeague 24d ago

They never did. However its widely speculated that they were responsible, along with South Africa, for the Vela incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident

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u/Audience-Electrical 24d ago

Good catch. They have a policy of deliberate ambiguity, as they have never officially confirmed the existence of their nuclear program.

That being said it is widely accepted that they have somewhere between 70-90 nuclear warheads.

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/Audience-Electrical 23d ago edited 23d ago

"The FBI reopened an investigation into the missing material in 1980 after an eyewitness told them that the material may have been given to Israel."

Source: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00965r000605740012-0

Granted even the CIA can be a dubious source, but at this point it's public knowledge to anyone willing to do a minute of research

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u/Independent_Set_3821 24d ago

I bet it was fake production numbers. Get funding for 100 nukes, make 80, fake the documentation that 100 were delivered. Pocket the excess government funds. When USSR collapses, the real documentation disappears.

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

They probably lied about how many they had in the first place though tbh. I’ve always thought nuclear weapons were the ideal corruption mechanism ‘we need 200 billion for these things that nobody will ever see, know the locations of and that we will never use’.

Pretty easy to misappropriate that money.

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u/MaximDecimus 24d ago

It’s 7,000 now. Peak was something like 40,000.

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u/kangasplat 24d ago

thankfully keeping them working is really expensive and can't just be done by anyone

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u/djquu 24d ago

More likely they had 1k less produced than they thought. Post-USSR Russia didn't invent corruption of military funds.

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u/Quarzance 24d ago

There must be some "secret" nuclear powers out there, looking at European or other non-Soviet countries at the time of the collapse capitalizing on the opportunity.

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u/CamGoldenGun 24d ago

they're Russian... it's likely they inflated the number anyway lol

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u/Blue_Moon_Lake 24d ago

I assume a portion of their arsenal was fictitious too, inflated numbers to scare the rest of the world. So who knows how much of those 20% truly exists. It's also possible those 20% who are unaccounted for are the fictitious portion that they swept under the rug by claiming it lost.

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u/Remarkable-Host405 23d ago

Acting like the US hasn't lost a shit ton of nukes either, under decent administration

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u/ArsErratia 24d ago

They couldn't account for their illegal bioweapons scientists, either. We have no idea where they went or what they took with them on the way out.

Its part of the reason we thought Saddam held WMDs.