No. of Recommendations: 10
I suppose clever people might be able to circumvent all the protections put around nuclear warheads. I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one or five movies where that was the main part of the plot. But keep in mind that of ALL things in the world, nuclear warheads tend to have the best protections of all. Even better protections than electronic money has.
I don't think it would be that hard. By far the hardest part of constructing a nuclear warhead is enriching the uranium or manufacturing the plutonium. If you have an existing warhead that is encrypted nine ways to Sunday, you could disassemble it, harvest the fissile material, and put it in a bomb of your own design.
At the time, the plan was to scoop up as many nuclear weapons as possible from the former Soviet Union (including Russia) and dispose of them by burning the fissile material in reactors in the United States.
Even in hindsight I think that was the correct action.
