>No, ukraine did not have the codes or any way to detonate the bombs otherwise. They were not functional and nukes are made to be extremely hard to detonate wit

>No, ukraine did not have the codes or any way to detonate the bombs otherwise. They were not functional and nukes are made to be extremely hard to detonate without the proper procedures. But not so hard that a nation of 40 million with many thousands of engineers who took part in designing every aspect of that bomb cannot figure it out if they want to. This would simply not be a serious issue. >But most importantly, nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicules are enormously expensive to maintain. Ukraine is already a very poor country now, but there was absolutely no way it could have afforded to maintain a nuclear arsenal in the 1990s. Hundreds of bombs, no. A dozen - easily. Yes, poor, but the sheer size of it would allow it to maintain a small nuclear arsenal. >And that's even if they didn't have to reverse engineer an arsenal that it did not even control. It did control it, because it was on Ukrainian soil, and you greatly overestimate the ability of a large country to reverse engineer or replace some detonators.