Dirty bombs are utterly useless as weapons of war. Their effect is mostly psychological - they might be good for terrorists, but nation states need H-bombs, and H-bombs need tritium and delivery ststems, both of which cost billions a year to maintain - and those billions need to actually be spent on maintaining missiles and warheads, rather than on the Colonel's vodka and hookers fund.
Disagree. Dirty bombs won't kill--but they are a denial weapon.
Only if the victims want them to be. It's trivially easy and not particularly expensive to decontaminate an area such that radiation falls to demonstrably safe levels for permanent habitation - say, to the natural background level in the city of Ramsar on the Iranian Caspian coast.
It's difficult and expensive to decontaminate to the original background level in a given location; It's also utterly unnecessary.
It's impossible to decontaminate to the point where no artificial radiation sources are present; And if someone says it's needful to do so, they are aiding the terrorists, whether they know it or not.
Russia has no working nuclear arsenal.
I wouldn't want to say "no". There might be someone who is actually doing his job.
It wouldn't help. There needs to be a whole complex organisation, all of which is made up of dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who are diligently doing their jobs, and who are supported by a regime that rewards (or at the very least, does not punish) whistleblowers.
No such organisation can exist in Russia.
If the Colonel wants to sell the fresh tritium on the black market, then the guy who was supposed to replace the out-of-date tritium in the warheads can either take his cut, and sign off the faked paperwork saying he did it, even though he didn't; or he can go to a gulag.
He cannot successfully challenge the corruption of those who outrank him.
When corruption has become endemic, it becomes inescapable. Tritium, plutonium, and rocket fuels are all valuable, and nuclear weapons are never used or tested, so if they stop working because one or more of these valuable things has been stolen, nobody is likely to find out about it.
And it doesn't stop there; There's a market for all kinds of precision components beyond those three things. And spare parts are easy to steal, difficult to replace*, and essential to maintain equipment in working order.
* For just one example, Soviet ballistic missiles use rocket engines made by the Yuzhmash facility (previously known just as 'Plant 586', and now called Pivdenmash), located in Dnipro, Ukraine. For some reason, this factory is currently disinclined to fill parts orders from Russia.
