Nuclear Weapons 771 - Has Russian Been Properly Maintaining Nuclear Warheads - Part 3 of 3 Parts

Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
     It is likely that the money was paid out for the servicing of Russian nuclear weapons. The question is whether or not the work was actually done. So what if tritium has not been put in Russian nuclear warheads? If nuclear weapons are ever used in quantity, that would be the end of civilization and no one will be looking for the people who were supposed to be servicing the warheads. Aside from Putin’s belligerence, Russia’s command and control systems do seem to conform to the doctrines of Mutually Assured Destruction which requires some confirmation of an incoming nuclear strike before the nuclear footballs go active to allow a strike to be ordered.
     With respect to the theft of tritium, it is fungible. It is used for many industrial and scientific applications. It would not be hard to fence or perhaps it would not have been purchased in the first place.
      The teams that load the tritium into the warheads would not be the only ones you would have to buy off. There is also the question of what happens to the tritium that was in the warhead before it was serviced. The old tritium would be mixed with helium. The maintenance team has to extract the old gas in the warhead before the new tritium can be injected. The old gas mixture has to be taken to someplace where it can be reprocessed because that is a way to recover some of the tritium costs. So, the reprocessors would also have to be bought off. However, reprocessing this gas is easy because the helium and hydrogen-3 are chemically different. The gas mixture is burned, the helium is released and the tritated water is electrolyzed to make pure tritium again. It is not a major industrial operation.
     Would it be possible to buy off all these people if you were the oligarch in charge of the maintenance program? If you received thirty million dollars in annual income from nuclear warhead maintenance, there would be plenty of money for bribes. There would be little chance that tritium theft would ever be dis covered. How could anyone find out that alpha-emitting gas (alpha particles can’t even penetrate a sheet of paper much less a bomb casing) that are supposed to be in the bomb is not actually there.
     Such a tritium grift could start with just some of the nuclear warheads in the arsenal. A nuclear nation does not really need forty-five hundred bombs to deter attacks by other nuclear powers. China only ever bothered to build a few hundred nuclear warheads. Even a few nuclear warheads falling on major industrial, military and population centers would destroy any country on Earth. Any oligarch who was working a tritium grift would be tempted to keep stealing more and more tritium as the years went by. It would be a tempting target for a corrupt oligarch who was charged with maintaining a nuclear arsenal.