3 ms·

You are right. There's a paper analyzing the situation "Fantasy Counterfactual: A Nuclear-Armed Ukraine" [1] and they identified numerous barriers. * The nuke

by retrac 5y ago

You are right. There's a paper analyzing the situation "Fantasy Counterfactual: A Nuclear-Armed Ukraine" [1] and they identified numerous barriers. * The nukes were actually Soviet, and when the USSR dissolved they came under the control of Russia in practice. They were physically in Ukraine but Ukraine did not have custody of the warheads, nor did they have access to the command systems and codes to fire them. (Kazakhstan and Belarus were in the same situation.) * Russia would almost certainly not have let them take the nukes! The most likely result of a Ukrainian seizure, or attempt at seizure, or basically anything but agreeing to hand them over in the early 90s, would have been Russia invading. They would probably have had European and American blessing to do so; the US was actively helping Russia track down and collect all their nukes and was, understandably, quite alarmed at the possibility of proliferation due to the USSR's break-up. * Even if Ukraine somehow managed to seize the nukes, not get invaded, not become an international pariah, and override the Soviet command systems, they still would not have been able to maintain them. Nuclear weapons are an active system, not something you can just store in a warehouse somewhere should you need them one day. The nuclear materials decay and need to be cycled out with reprocessed materials on a regular schedule. Equipment needs maintenance, especially the rockets. None of the nukes or delivery systems would have been working within a few years. Ukraine did not have the facilities or resources to maintain them, nor was developing them a particularly realistic possibility. (They'd basically need cooperation from another nuclear power, or to do their version of a Manhattan project.) [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2015.1026091 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2015.1...

justin66 5y ago
It's interesting. The Intercept article's comparisons with Iran, Libya, and Pakistan are pretty strained for the reasons you gave. On the other hand, in exchange for handing over some dangerous items of great value Ukraine received some very explicit assurances about its security in the Budapest Memorandum, written assurances of a sort that Iran and Libya never received. If you're willing to zoom out a little bit the doing the right thing with nukes really did not work out for them argument still basically holds. Doing the wrong thing would have been dangerous and very expensive, but that's perhaps orthogonal to the original point.

by retrac 5y ago

justin66 5y ago

It's interesting. The Intercept article's comparisons with Iran, Libya, and Pakistan are pretty strained for the reasons you gave. On the other hand, in exchange for handing over some dangerous items of great value Ukraine received some very explicit assurances about its security in the Budapest Memorandum, written assurances of a sort that Iran and Libya never received. If you're willing to zoom out a little bit the doing the right thing with nukes really did not work out for them argument still basically holds. Doing the wrong thing would have been dangerous and very expensive, but that's perhaps orthogonal to the original point.