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Comment by kiliantics | Hacker News Reader

These seem like pretty reasonable ways for them to be lost. Though the headline suggestion did give me a scary thought: if we do end up on a trajectory of social collapse, most likely caused by ecosystem breakdown, then the resulting failed states could make it very easy for weapons such as these to get "lost".

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You may be interested in the history of the Semipalatinsk Test Site, and what happened when the USSR broke up.

There was something of a heroic, very secret effort to get the place more or less secured and reduce its proliferation risk.

https://thebulletin.org/2013/08/into-thin-air-the-story-of-p...

> Some of these tests—particularly tests involving plutonium—did not vaporize the material in a nuclear blast. It remained in tunnels and containers, in forms that could be recovered and recycled into a bomb. In addition, the Soviet Union discarded equipment that included high-purity plutonium that would have provided materials and information that could lead to a relatively sophisticated nuclear device if it had been found.

> When scientists and military personnel withdrew from Kazakhstan following the collapse of the Soviet Union, they abandoned tunnels and bore holes filled with plutonium residue—enough plutonium, if fully reclaimed, for terrorists or a state to construct dozens of nuclear bombs. Between 1991 and 2012, scavengers looking for valuable metal and equipment from the former Soviet test site came within yards of the unguarded fissile material; in two cases the scavengers broke into the vessels used to contain some of the experiments, although there is no evidence that they removed any plutonium.

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-...

Yes, but they don't maintain efficacy for very long. The tritium bomb triggers have a short shelf-life.

The radioactive material could be used for dirty bombs, but if there's societal collapse, I don't think such a tactic would have much of a useful place for anyone.

I probably should have mentioned that the three I listed above aren't the three the headline is talking about. The three the article talks about were all assembled: one in Georgia (USA), one in Greenland, and one in the Philippine Sea.

you dont need ecosystem breakdown. could easily happen in pakistan right now

Why Pakistan in particular? I would think a country like North Korea is the most likely candidate

North Korea is a Chinese client state. The Chinese aren’t going to permit that.

Pakistan has a porous border with Afghanistan and thousands of its own armed extremists (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, Islamic State offshoots) who are frequently at odds with the government.

North Korea seems more stable funnily enough

because they actually have a lot of those weapons and an extremely unstable/poor state.

Vice reported this wild story of a Bulgarian black market weapons dealer selling a warhead from Pakistan in 2007.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c4f4NJSB_4

edit: aside, it's amazing how badly they flubbed reading Cyrillic on the road signs in the opening minute.

Who needs nukes? Ukraine is currently being pumped full of billions of dollars of conventional weaponry, and the Westerners responsible admit that they have no idea where most of it is going. In fact much of it is supposedly turning up on the darkweb markets - which is to say that it's now possible for anyone with bitcoin to buy a Stinger missile.

Think about that the next time you get on a plane.

Based on the amount of killed Russian units and destroyed Russian material I'd say tracking where it ends up is fairly simple. Supposedly.

Some mainstream news outlets estimate roughly 30% of the weapons we ship to Ukraine actually end up in the fight against Russia.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/arming-ukraine-cbs-reports/

I tend to lean towards "there's no way to make a reasonable estimate at all" given the lack of oversight, as reported by other mainstream news organizations.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/19/politics/us-weapons-ukraine-i...

Unfortunately many are blinded to reality by their zealotry on the issue. Others understand the truth, but believe statements of objective reality that don't "support the effort" should never be uttered because it hurts the cause or "echoes Russian propaganda". The truth is that the "fog of war" is a very real thing in every conflict and it is foolish to make definitive statements one way or the other.

> Some mainstream news outlets estimate roughly 30% of the weapons we ship to Ukraine actually end up in the fight against Russia.

This statistic is from a sample size of 1, and comes from a single person working at a NGO and relates to _non-military_ aid early in the war.

CBS is driving up clicks by posting fake news.

The real fake news is coming from people who claim to definitively know what is happening in the war zone.

> The real fake news is coming from people who claim to definitively know what is happening in the war zone.

So you are conceding that the CBS article could be fake news as they are trying to claim what is happening in a war zone?.

My opinion is based off the response from the organisation that CBS interviewed.

Nobody knows Russian losses. Not even Russian officials (though they probably have best estimates, but they will not release the numbers, not until this operation is over). Everything you read in Russian news is Russian propaganda which lowers estimates. Everything you read in Western (or god save Ukrainian) news is anti-Russian propaganda which makes up numbers out of thin air, because West in active proxy war against Russia and its news agencies are just propaganda speakers on the other side.

Ditto about Ukrainian loses.

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