So, when the USSR disbanded, many ex-soviet states (i.e. Ukraine) were stuck with a nuclear arsenal they couldn&#x27;t maintain and didn&#x27;t want.<p>In theory, Russia took the warheads back and looked after them.<p>In practice, there was an initial period of everything that wasn&#x27;t bolted down disappearing from silos, and the response was to fill them with concrete to prevent any further access.<p>What then happened is gangs came in the dead of night with diggers and drills and unearthed silos, and took who knows what.<p>My source is a lengthy chat with a chap at Pervomaisk, a Soviet missile silo in Ukraine, who used to be the guy who&#x27;d press the button (there are two buttons and two keys, but he explained that you could use the soviet flagpole in there to press the other button). Now he gives tours to tourists. $1 for Ukrainians. $5 for Russians. $10 for ex-USSR members. $20 for foreigners. $100 for Americans - or something like that. I laughed heartily at their pricing structure, before straddling the Satan missile for the obligatory &quot;riding the bomb&quot; photo.<p>This same phenomenon was mirrored elsewhere in the ex-USSR, and wasn&#x27;t limited to fissile material - Degelen mountain in Kaz, for one, where they not only dug up left over Pu, but also thousands of tonnes of radioactive copper (cabling used for remote monitoring, power, and detonation of subsurface tests), which made its way into the global electronic supply chain, and was only discovered after they installed x-ray detectors at Dover for scanning for stowaways. My original source for that was a British truck driver who was paid to keep hush and not talk about why he&#x27;d ended up with (mild, flu-like, had to retire) radiation sickness - but it hit the press a few years later anyway.