[narby]

Reasonable sized nukes (smaller than the WWII bombs) are perishable within a few years. Whatever they could have smuggled out of Russia when the USSR was disolving can't possibly do anything more than be a "dirty" bomb today.

[theBuckwheat]

I heard this author speak on a radio program. He mentioned that the Russian nukes in his scenario use tritium. Apart from the fact he was wrong about the half-life of tritium (which is 12.3 years), he trivialized the issue of how to "recharge" the device when the tritium was no longer sufficient.

The main issue is that there are only a very few sources of tritium at the present time so of course these are very tightly controlled. While my research on the subject is not conclusive, I recall some years ago hearing that there was only one source in the US.

I am not a weapons designer, so I cannot say whether the tritium is necessary for the device to detonate or just that the tritium is used to increase the yield. In the former case, a device would then become just a "dirty" bomb, or the source material inside a larger dirty bomb. The result is that the tritium issue is a debate about consequences that are either only horrible or simply unimaginable.