Corrupt Russian military officials selling nuclear weapons to terrorists was central to the plot of the video game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear (1999).
The movie review page is linked indirectly via an old comment that specifies item #4 - the Tom Clancy Plot Generator.
It was intended as a humorous nostalgia trip for some, while making the point that in real life the Russians last month arrested a senior military official for selling T-90 engines, and that anything's possible in those conditions.
Real life can sometimes be more cartoonish than fiction, unfortunately.
>Real life can sometimes be more cartoonish than fiction, unfortunately.
During the Cold War and the ensuing Cuban Missle Crisis[0][1], those relatively few of us remaining who were in Florida (a much less populous state) at the time, preparing more seriously than most other states to "survive" nuclear attack, might remember why they called him Boris Badenov[2][3].
Yes he was bad enough, but never entirely competent.
Americans had no trouble understanding that was a very unrealistic cartoonish exaggeration.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
>Arguably, the most dangerous moment in the crisis was not recognized until the Cuban Missile Crisis Havana conference, in October 2002. . . [only after 40 years had passed] Unknown to the US, it [Soviet submarine] was armed with a 15-kiloton nuclear torpedo. Running out of air, the Soviet submarine was surrounded by American warships and desperately needed to surface. An argument broke out among three officers aboard [the sub] . . . including submarine captain Valentin Savitsky, political officer Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov, and Deputy brigade commander Captain 2nd rank (US Navy Commander rank equivalent) Vasily Arkhipov. An exhausted Savitsky became furious and ordered that the nuclear torpedo on board be made combat ready. . . Thomas Blanton, director of the [US] National Security Archive, said, "A guy called Vasily Arkhipov saved the world."
The serious argument is that their real life battlefield readiness amounts to a joke based on cartoonish[0] levels of corruption, so never say never.
There's a considerably less serious one that has established historical precedent.[1][2][3][4]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-colonel-accused-stea...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtmW0_MV2rk#t=144m53s
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtmW0_MV2rk#t=86m02s
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7xiK-snyJk (context)
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2191634 (further context)