Accessing a runtime assigned Object from another component?

Question

As it stands I can't seem to make sense of the events in my program. I have two components. One called EnemyMeleeSwitching and one called EnemyAI.

EnemyMeleeSwitching, who's script is contained in the same parent level as EnemyAI at runtime selects a random Weapon(object) from a list and assigns the enemyWeapon object variable as that Weapon.

Now I am under the impression that accessing the EnemyMeleeSwitching component and further the Weapon component from my EnemyAI script should allow me to then access enemyWeapon however I am getting a NullReferenceException.

Does this have something to do with execution order? Is my EnemyAI script trying to access enemyWeapon before it's been assigned?

EnemyMeleeSwitching Code below:

public class EnemyWeaponSwitching : MonoBehaviour 
{
    public Weapon enemyWeapon;
    public Weapon weapon01;
    public Weapon weapon02;

    private List<Weapon> weapons = new List<Weapon>();

    void Start()
    {
        weapons.Add(weapon01);
        weapons.Add(weapon02);

        enemyWeapon = weapons[Random.Range(0, weapons.Count)];

        foreach (Weapon weapon in weapons)
        {
            weapon.SetActive(false);
        }

        enemyWeapon.SetActive(true);
    }
}

EnemyAI Code call below:

weapon = (Weapon)gameObject.GetComponent<EnemyWeaponSwitching>().enemyWeapon;

Answer 1

As a follow up to my question I managed to solve this problem by moving the code from Start() to a new function which I called after establishing a reference to EnemyWeaponSwitching. This assigned the required object variable before I then called it in my EnemyAI code.

New code below:

(EnemyAI)

weaponSwitching = gameObject.GetComponentInChildren<EnemyWeaponSwitching>();
        weaponSwitching.GenerateWeapon();

        attackRange = weaponSwitching.enemyWeapon.maxAttackRange;

(EnemyWeaponSwitching)

public void GenerateWeapon()
{
    weapons.Add(weapon01);
    weapons.Add(weapon02);

    enemyWeapon = weapons[Random.Range(0, weapons.Count)];

    foreach (Weapon weapon in weapons)
    {
        weapon.SetActive(false);
    }

    enemyWeapon.SetActive(true);
}