Back when the Berlin wall fell down, they should have shipped all fissile material to secure locations within Russia, not left it lying around former republics. I thought that was what they had done.
“Back when the Berlin wall fell down, they should have shipped all fissile material to secure locations within Russia, not left it lying around former republics. I thought that was what they had done.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union was pure chaos. There was no planning and no control over anything. The mechanisms that might have kept control broke as everybody scrambled to grab a piece of the pie for themselves. Soldiers guarding nuclear weapons went unpaid for months and had to go hunting for food, leaving their missiles unguarded while they did so.