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Before it collapsed in 1991, the Soviet Union (S.U.) manufactured more than twenty-seven thousand nuclear weapons. They also produced more than enough weapons grade uranium and plutonium to make another eighty-one thousand nuclear weapons. The S.U. suffered severe economic distress, widespread corruption, lax security and dependency on the bureaucratic. These factors raise the question of whether some nuclear weapons and/or material may have been lost or stolen from their arsenal.
The former Soviet republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine were armed with Soviet nuclear weapons. All of these Soviet-era nuclear weapons were returned to post-communist Russia in the 1990s after the fall of the S.U. Fears remain over how the weapons-grade stockpiles of uranium and plutonium could be used. A far greater fear is whether or not all the old S.U. nuclear weapons have been properly accounted for. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reported more than one hundred nuclear smuggling incidents since 1993. Eighteen of those incidents involved highly enriched uranium.
In the late 1990s, Alexander Lebed claimed that the Russian military lost track of over one hundred small Soviet nuclear bombs referred to as “suitcase nukes.” Lebed said that each of these weapons had a yield of one kiloton. They were capable of killing as many as one hundred thousand people. They could be carried and detonated by a single person.
Russia denied Lebed claims. They said that he may have mistaken “dummy small-scale” training devices for actual weapons. In the twenty-four years since Lebed’s report, there have been no verified examples of any Soviet-era suitcase bombs being discovered. Fortunately, no such weapons have been detonated by terrorist organizations.
However, at least two Soviet nuclear weapons have been lost. Both of them are still aboard the Soviet nuclear submarine Komsomolets (K-278) which was put into service in 1984. On April 7th, 1989, the K-278 was operating at a depth of one thousand two hundred and sixty-six feet when a fire broke out. The inexperienced crew was unable to deal with the problem, which was exacerbated by a lack of a dedicated damage control party.
The K-278 was able to surface but the abrupt pressure change caused the top hatch to be blown off. This threw two crewmembers out of the chamber. The K-278 soon sank. In addition to its nuclear reactor, it carried two nuclear armed Shkval torpedoes. Norway pressured the Soviets to find the K-278 and they conducted a deep-sea search. The location of the sunken submarine was discovered in June of 1989.
Between 1989 and 1998, seven expeditions were conducted to secure the reactor against leakages of radioactive materials and to seal the torpedo tubes.
If a terrorist group could obtain a Soviet suitcase bomb, they could destroy a major city anywhere in the world. However, this presupposed that the terrorists had the technical expertise to activate and detonate such a bomb. Even if they did not, they could dismantle the bomb to obtain the radioactive materials it contained to construct a dirty bomb. Dirty bombs just use conventional explosives with a shell of radioactive materials. Distributed over a wide area, the radioactive fallout from such a bomb could render a major city uninhabitable.