Plenty of nuclear material is unaccounted for, from hospitals, businesses, militaries, even recently from Chernobyl. In 2018, plutonium and cesium were stolen from a Department of Energy official’s car in San Antonio, Texas, while they slept in a nearby hotel. The nightmare scenario is a loose warhead, stolen in transit or even somehow missed in an accounting exercise. It may sound fanciful, but the United States has in fact lost at least three nuclear weapons.
