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> Iran never had the deterrent North Korea had. I feel very conflicted about what's happening. On one side it is clear that no country should give up their WM

• davedx 1y ago
  Don’t forget Ukraine - gave up their nukes and look what happened
  • lIl-IIIl 1y ago
    They never really had them. They were in Ukraine but Moscow had control.
    • cromka 1y ago
      Then why would they need a full Budapest memorandum with co-signees if Moscow could just take them back? This sounds ridiculous.
      • dlahoda 1y ago
        because rockets to be transported to russkies back. if they would not sign, some bad things could happened along the way.
      • varjag 1y ago
        It was indeed because there was no legal foundation for Russian ownership of all Soviet nuclear assets, no matter how every other nuclear power wanted it at the time.
        • epolanski 1y ago
          By the way a "memorandum" is a document that forms no legal foundation at all.
    • TiredOfLife 1y ago
      And Ukraine built them.
      • renerick 1y ago
        That's not true. All nuclear weapons in USSR were built inside modern Russian territory, there was no production in any other republic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project#Logistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project#Log...
        • varispeed 1y ago
          He probably meant Ukrainian engineers. One of the reasons Moscow is so laser focused and grabbing Ukraine as it used to be Soviet's Union brain.
          • franktankbank 1y ago
            Is this real? Why would Ukraine be such a concentration of brain power compared to other regions? I'm not super skeptical given the few Ukrainians I've met but still humans are generally equal...
            • justsomehnguy 1y ago
              > Is this real? You can see the link in GP comment by yourself.
              • lIl-IIIl 1y ago
                I don't see where in the link it says that.
      • nine_k 1y ago
        The rockets, not the nukes (warheads).
    • varjag 1y ago
      This is a minor distinction. In they end they all set off by pyrotechnic charges. Authorization sequence is nothing an industrial power can't get around.
      • epolanski 1y ago
        You seem to completely misunderstand why the entire world wanted Ukraine to get rid of their ICBMs. 1) They could not operate them. It isn't just about authorization sequence, it's about having all of the required electronics. You need satellites that point and guide the ICBMs. All of those were in Moscow hands. Even if Ukraine could ignite them, it could not launch them or set their paths, etc. 2) They did not have the budget to guard them, let alone maintain them, even less reverse engineer. The biggest risk was that rough states with deep pockets would buy those rockets on the black market (and Ukraine notably sold out most of their soviet arsenal). 3) Thus, the only real asset was the nuclear material itself. An asset that was more likely going to end up on the black market than do anything useful for Ukraine's defense.
        • varispeed 1y ago
          Really? 1) Nukes were built mostly by Ukrainian engineers. They would do just fine. They could also build and launch satellites if needed. 2) So Ukraine couldn't launch them because they needed electronics and satellites, but some rogue state with deep pocket could? Okay. 3) Of course! Comrade, that is Russian propaganda you are disseminating here.
        • krzyk 1y ago
          Don't forget, but keeping nukes in Ukraine, would mean that Russia would get less of them.
          • cmcaleer 1y ago
            It wasn't really particularly material whether Russia had 30,000 nukes or 32,000 nukes in 1994. It was material if other states got the components that were in those 2,000 nukes.
    • libertine 1y ago
      That's a recurring Russian propaganda point, which is easily verifiable as a lie. Even basic logic - Ukraine had the technical know-how to do whatever they wanted with the nukes. Moscow didn't have control, at best on paper - if they had control, there was no need for the Budapest Memorandum. I keep debunking this propaganda point over and over again lol
  • walterlw 1y ago
    Now every country that has the capacity to get a strategic deterrent will race to get one. So much for Biden's escalation management. Too bad Trump likes Russia so much he does everything not to step on their toes. With a heftier backing from the US the Russo-Ukrainian war would be over by now.
    • averageRoyalty 1y ago
      Genuine question, if the US has that capability and Trump is the issue, why didn't Biden do what was needed to make the war over?
      • lazide 1y ago
        The US has every incentive to turn Ukraine into Russia’s Vietnam.
      • walterlw 1y ago
        Biden took the approach of keeping 10 pairs of gloves on when dealing with Russia. Don't help too little not to make it too easy for the russians, don't help to much to avoid escalation.
        • averageRoyalty 1y ago
          I understand and agree with that. But you said "With a heftier backing from the US the Russo-Ukrainian war would be over by now.". If that was viable, why would Biden not have done so during the years he had?
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • FpUser 1y ago
      >"With a heftier backing from the US the Russo-Ukrainian war would be over by now." And you know this how? Accordingly to all those initial predictions Russia should be already disintegrated and fallen under heavy sanctions, Putin's regime replaced etc. etc. I suspect all these analytics and think tanks should be cleaning toilets instead. Also there is a line in that backing crossing which may lead to an all out nuclear war. Rational countries that matter understandably do not want to test it unless their existence is really threatened.
  • justsomehnguy 1y ago
    Not theirs and you conveniently omit everything what happened in between, including the giant amounts of money directly and indirectly poured into it.
    • o_m 1y ago
      What do you mean it was not theirs? The Soviet Union was dissolved and split into multiple states. Russia is not the Soviet Union, just another part of the former Soviet Union like Ukraine.
      • justsomehnguy 1y ago
        sigh Please, take a 15 minutes to educate yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Armed_Forces#Structure_and_leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Armed_Forces#Structure_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Rocket_Forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Rocket_Forces
      • severino 1y ago
        Russia is not the Soviet Union, except when we need to talk things like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia or all the other horror stories about the USSR. Then it was indeed Russia, and Ukraine was just a kidnapped state.
• margorczynski 1y ago
  > Libya, Syria, Iraq gave up their WMD projects eventually got bombed/attacked. This is the key. People talk some crazy stories about Iran being a theocratic state whose life mission is destroying Israel but the fact is they don't want to end up like Libya, Syria or any other country Israel considers a threat. And a reminder - Israel has illegals WMDs, using technology and nuclear material stolen from the US. So thinking Iran will simply nuke Israel because it has that capability is silly - it would mean mutual destruction.
  • dlahoda 1y ago
    israel is way smaller and easier to bomb. why would not iran gov sacrifice few million of its people to kill whole israel?
    • spwa4 1y ago
      Because Iran is a developed country and the Iranian population actually has a future if they take their government back from the clerics? Hell, in the next 30 or so years oil will disappear from the middle east, and Iran is just about the only country that has a realistic shot at still having an economy after that.
      • _zagj 1y ago
        > Because Iran is a developed country and the Iranian population actually has a future if they take their government back from the clerics They're talking about the current regime, from which it isn't clear the population will ever successfully take back their country.
      • HPsquared 1y ago
        Libya was pretty developed with an educated population, decent economy etc too, more developed then Iran I'd say.. look how that turned out. State collapse is no joke.
        • ALLTaken 1y ago
• nine_k 1y ago
  Indeed, nuclear weapons are a tricky thing. On one hand, there are nuclear non-proliferation treaties, on the other, peaceful nuclear power plants. To obtain nukes, you have to have good relationships with the current big powers, build peaceful nuclear installations, and very covertly produce the weapons based on it, while the big boys look the other way, or maybe even secretly help. That's approximately how China, India, Pakistan, and Israel obtained their nukes. (North Korea is a special case.) Once you've obtained some nukes, complete with decent rockets to liv them, nobody is going to mess with you too badly, or try to take the nukes back; you're now a member if the club. Japan or South Korea would likely be able to produce nuclear weapons in a few months if they needed to. I bet even Ukraine could, with its remaining nuclear plants and relatively advanced industry, and are on friendly terms with the US. But if you made enemies with the big members of the nuclear club, and with the US in particular, they will do everything to stop you, and your situation would become much harder; that's the case with Iran.
• contrarian1234 1y ago
  But why a nuclear bomb? I never understood the logic.. (or maybe it's the theatric element?) There are other WMD that seem much simpler. If they hypothetically release some horrible biological agent in Israel - it could incapacitate the country overnight Or set off a dirty bomb to make huge regions unlivable (just the perception of radiation risk would preclude many from living there.. see Fukushima)
• lonelyasacloud 1y ago
  > You lack that deterrent you get attacked, as simple as that. Libya, Syria, Iraq gave up their WMD projects eventually got bombed/attacked. Or had them, and then gave them up because they were under the impression that they would be protected if they did so; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_de...
• compsciphd 1y ago
  why do you view nukes as the ultimate deterrent? Israel has nukes and it gets attacked. This proves the above is a logical fallacy.
• moltude 1y ago
  Add Ukraine to that list.
• perihelions 1y ago
  > "You lack that deterrent you get attacked, as simple as that. Libya, Syria, Iraq gave up their WMD projects eventually got bombed/attacked." It's not that simple. Those countries were destined towards collapse with or without nuclear weapons. Iraq, Libya, Syria—those are three countries that fell into catastrophic civil wars, along internal conflict lines, in power vacuums succeeding an unpopular dictator. None of those autocracies were stable in the long-term. (But a nuclear weapon is quite stable; it succeeds the falls of governments and passes on to whoever replaces them). Deplore US' strategic stupidities all you want; but it's not the only actor with agency in the world. Would anyone have been better off with Assad fighting a version of the 2010's civil war with nuclear weapons in his arsenal? Or Hussein, that sectarian war? Those are two men who gassed thousands of innocents with nerve agents; they wouldn't surely wouldn't hesitate long about dropping nukes. (Can you deter a civil war with nuclear weapons?) We could also ask who would have inherited a hypothetical Qaddafi nuke, after his fall: which Libya? There were at least three Libyas one point. ISIL governed one! (One semantic nitpick: I don't think it's fair to say those dictators "gave up" their WMD's. With all three, their WMD programs were forcibly taken from them. In Iraq, 1981, the bombing of the Osirak reactor; and again in the 1991 Gulf War the bombing of Tuwaitha (which permanently ended Iraq's uranium enrichment). Qaddafi turned over all his nuclear materials to the USA, after being directly threatened, in the months following US' 2003 invasion of Iraq. And Assad lost his North Korean-built plutonium reactor in 2007, to an airstrike. Did anyone of these dictators have agency in those "give up WMD" choices? I think not).
  • southernplaces7 1y ago
    >Those countries were destined towards collapse with or without nuclear weapons. Iraq, Libya, Syria—those are three countries that fell into catastrophic civil wars, along internal conflict lines, For Libya and Syria, sure, but what are you talking about for Iraq? Saddam was unambiguously ousted from an internally secure position of power by a foreign invasion that followed in the wake of over a decade of heavy sanctions and no-fly zone imposure. By many accounts, Saddam had a strong base of support within his population and his rule was stable (backed by a blend of patronage and severe terror obviously) right up until the day he was ousted by vastly superior military might from outside. While it's extremely hard to know what would have happened to his regime had he still been in power by the time of the Arab Spring and the events that caused the ouster of Gaddafi and eventually Assad, Saddam would surely have been able to stay in power at least up to then. I certainly don't imagine him having more difficulty handling an internal strife of the kind that ruined Assad's dictatorship. Except for his catastrophic miscalculation of making a long-term enemy of the US during the first, utterly pointless Gulf War, he at least showed himself to be the far more experienced and careful dictator during his rule.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• BrandoElFollito 1y ago
  Ukraine is another example from a different area
• scotty79 1y ago
  > On one side it is clear that no country should give up their WMD projects. That sounds insane. I don't think world would be more peaceful if every country under every government had WMDs. We'd be in the middle of nuclear winter now if that was the case. You could draw analogies to everyone owning a gun. We know it just ends up with many more dead and nothing being more peaceful. > Since you name NK that's a clear example of a country having nuclear deterrent actually saving the region from a conflict. He's wrong. What protects North Korea is that it's poor, has no natural resources and devastated human capital and neither attacks anyone with terrorist attacks nor credibly prophesies their intent to kill any nation or ethnicity. If they did that, they'd be steamrolled already. WMDs or not.
• ashoeafoot 1y ago
  All those countries would have plunged into internal turmoil after arab spring - us involvement or not - so Isis, hezbullah or al quaida with nukes would be the news now.
• JKCalhoun 1y ago
  > Libya, Syria, Iraq gave up their WMD projects eventually got bombed/attacked. By your logic, I am a little surprised Iran is still even a state then.
• ben_w 1y ago
  > That's speculation. Since you name NK that's a clear example of a country having nuclear deterrent actually saving the region from a conflict. So, I have an honest (non rhetorical) question: Was NK saved more by having their own nukes, or by sharing a land border with China who has nukes and doesn't want the US getting involved in the area?
  • amelius 1y ago
    I have a question: why did China allow NK to develop nukes?
  • dummydummy1234 1y ago
    North Korea deterrent has always been the amount of artillery 50 km from soul. Nuclear weapons can target, the US based on the region, sure. But NK does not need nukes to reduce the south Korean capital to rubble.
• quonn 1y ago
  > You lack that deterrent you get attacked, as simple as that No you don't, unless you're a dictatorship (including all the examples you gave).
  • mdorazio 1y ago
    Ukraine would like to have a word with you.
    • quonn 1y ago
      Ukraine was not in the examples given and you read both the original post and my response wrong. The post did not say „if you have nuclear weapons you don‘t get attacked“. It said „if you don‘t have nuclear weapons you get attacked“. Of course you get attacked by Russia either way, but that‘s not the point. The point is that you don‘t get attacked by anyone else unless you‘re a dictatorship.
• mattmaroon 1y ago
  Ukraine gave up working nukes, don’t forget them. I think the point of this bombing is to change the calculus you just mentioned. Now there’s an actual reason to not try for nukes, you may get bombed. NK’s conventional weapons (and SK’s pointed right back at them) saved them from conflict, that’s how they got to nukes without us doing something like this. They already had mutually assured destruction from conventional weapons and proximity to an ally. Iran’s problem is we don’t care much about anyone around them except Israel, and they already would destroy Israel if they could, so they had nobody’s head at which to aim their bullet. NK’s government is an evil one but the Kims really like being alive and that keeps them somewhat rational. They are quite obviously not religious since they claim to be God (and surely are aware they are not), so they don’t believe in benefits to martyrdom. Islamism is a death cult (and I mean that literally) so their actions aren’t rational as we would define the word. We can’t rely on their self-preservation instinct the way we can with the Kims.
  • somenameforme 1y ago
    Ukraine never had "control" of nukes. Russia was the sole producer/controller of nukes within the USSR. Those nukes were then deployed throughout the USSR, but the individual regions within the USSR never had any capability to independently launch or control those nukes. It would be akin to what will happen when the US eventually collapses and we have military bases and nukes scattered throughout the world. Germany in that case will then briefly technically have nukes, but no ability to knowledge of how to launch or control them. Had Ukraine tried to hold onto those nukes and/or figure out how to launch them they would likely have been invaded by just about every country in the world, including the US, so they gave them up for a few bucks and some kind words. And I strongly disagree about Iran. Pakistan is also an Islamic country (with its proper name being the Islamic Republic of Pakistan) and a nuclear power, and they haven't just decided to go nuke India who they have abysmal relations with. Religion does provide a different level of comfort with death (and Iran has a longgggggg history of enduring pain to expel invaders on top), but it does not just turn people into death cult members. There's some irony in that if Iran had nuclear weapons their relations with Israel would likely have been much better. Because Israel wouldn't have been constantly attacking, assassinating, and otherwise doing everything they could to undermine the country. It's similar to how if North Korea didn't have nukes then South Korea, largely as a proxy of the US, would likely have been actively attacking them.
• gcanyon 1y ago
  > Since you name NK that's a clear example of a country having nuclear deterrent actually saving the region from a conflict. How has the situation been better in the twenty years NK has had nuclear weapons than the fifty years after the Korean war and before NK got nukes?
• gcanyon 1y ago
  South Africa gave up actual nuclear weapons and didn't get attacked. I think tying the "got attacked" back to "gave up their nuclear program" bit requires justification.
• slv77 1y ago
  North Korea had enough conventional artillery to level Seoul with an estimated 1M casualties. That was why Clinton decided against attacking North Korea as they moved towards building the bomb: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/north-koreas-artillery-enough-annihilate-seoul-198612 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/north-koreas-artill... Iran’s deterrent was/is through its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) along with its sizable missile inventory, anti-air capabilities and strategic threats to oil and gas exports. Israel’s investment in missile defense and the outcome of the Oct 7th attacks severely weakened Iran’s deterrence to a conventional attack. I think the lesson should be that any nation that has enough conventional leverage to deter an attack could choose to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons may complement, but can’t displace other capabilities. The US has nuclear weapons but that didn’t deter Iran from launching direct attacks on US troops in the Middle East or sponsoring insurgents in Iraq. Nuclear weapons are also essential worthless against non nation-state actors such as Al-Qaeda.
  • b33j0r 1y ago
    I have become much more skeptical about DNK’s artillery after seeing the results of a frontline air-superiority stalemate in Ukraine and the Israeli campaign against Iran. If South Korea’s coalition could establish air superiority over the DMZ and artillery range in the first moves, I think it takes you from “Seoul destroyed” to a “pretty average modern conflict.” Hot take for sure, but war has changed.
• tome 1y ago
  > Libya, Syria, Iraq gave up their WMD projects eventually got bombed/attacked That's ahistorical in the case of Syria and Iraq. Israel destroyed the nascent nuclear weapons programmes of Syria and Iraq, just as it has done to Iran's. Syria and Iraq did not give up those programmes willingly.