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They never had the launch codes, which were controlled by the Soviet Union, whose successor was Russia.
by Synaesthesia 2y ago
They never had the launch codes, which were controlled by the Soviet Union, whose successor was Russia.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoYou think the Ukrainian commanders serving for the Soviet union didn't have the codes?
- jjallen 2y agoPretty sure you could figure out how to launch a nuke if you possessed them and were a decently sized nation state with decent universities...
- ashoeafoot 2y agoand had the people who built them in the first place
- rwmj 2y agoInteresting question, and actually the answer could be no (surprisingly). Some US nukes use varying compositions of high explosives in the primary stage. You have to set them off in a particular order, and that's the launch code (or part of it presumably). Even possessing the nukes, it would be hard to work out that sequence, since testing the explosives is destructive. And if you fire them in the wrong order, the primary fizzles and the bomb doesn't work. (I've no idea if the Russian weapons used such a system)