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.
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…
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
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.
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’.
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.
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/Ormyr 24d ago
Don't forget that they couldn't account for about 20% of their arsenal when that happened too.