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Comment by immibis

3 months ago

Ukraine WAS a nuclear weapons state, until the US agreed to protect them from Russia with the US's nuclear weapons, if they gave up their own.

96 comments

immibis

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Mikhail_Edoshin  3 months ago

It wasn't. It had some weapons on their territory but could not use them. The red button was always in Moscow.

  • JumpCrisscross  3 months ago

    > It had some weapons on their territory but could not use them. The red button was always in Moscow

    In the 90s. Twenty years buys lots of time for code cracking, reverse engineering and—if that fails—bullshitting.

    With the benefit of hindsight, Ukraine should have kept its nukes. (Finland, the Baltics, Poland and Romania should probably develop them.)

    • SiempreViernes  3 months ago

      Right stealing nukes you cannot immediately operate as a 0-year old nation, to me it doesn't seems like an incredibly bright idea in a world where the existing nuclear states doesn't want anyone else to get nukes too.

      And in any case it's was not simply removing the safety devices on the weapons, you need to be able to target the ICBMs at Russia, which Ukraine could not do:

      > In fact, the presence of strategic nuclear missiles on its territory posed several dilemmas to a Ukraine hypothetically bent on keeping them to deter Russia. The SS-24s do not have the ability to strike targets at relatively short distances (that is, below about 2000 km); the variable-range SS- 19s are able, but Ukraine cannot properly maintain them. [...] the SS-19s were built in Russia and use a highly toxic and volatile liquid fuel. To complicate matters further, targeting programs and blocking devices for the SS-24 are Russian made. The retargeting of ICBM is probably impossible without geodetic data from satellites which are not available to Kiev.

      > Cruise missiles for strategic bombers stored in Ukraine have long been 'disabled in place'.[...] As with ICBMs, however, retargeting them would be impossible for Ukraine, which does not have access to data from geodetic satellites; the same goes for computer maintenance.

      From SIPRI research report 10; The Soviet Nuclear Weapon Legacy

      So Ukraine did not have usable weapons at hand. But it did, and does, certainly have the capacity to build entirely new weapons, if given time.

      6 replies →

    • M95D  3 months ago

      Oh, please, please, exclude Romania. I live close to our nuclear power plant. I'm scared of our incompetence as it is, without trying to make any nukes.

      1 reply →

insane_dreamer  3 months ago

What actually happened to the nukes the Ukrainians had? Were they transferred to the US? Destroyed?

  • throw-the-towel  3 months ago

    Those were Soviet nukes, physically located in Ukraine but not controlled by it, same as any French/US nukes stationed in Germany would not make it a nuclear state.

    The ones in Ukraine got moved into Russia, in exchange for Ukraine receiving money and security guarantees.

polski-g  3 months ago

The Senate never ratified that treaty, so no the US never agreed to so that. And the Budapest Memorandum doesn't say that anyway.

Lapsa  3 months ago

afaik Ukraine never got paid for nuclear disarmament as initially agreed - about $200 billions

  • wat10000  3 months ago

    I wonder where people get these ideas. The Budapest Memorandum is very short, it'll take five minutes to read if you want to know what was actually agreed. It seems like people just sort of imagine what they would have agreed to, and run with it.

  • SiempreViernes  3 months ago

    They got paid mainly in nuclear fuel, there was some disagreement at the rate by which they got fuel in exchange for the weapons and maybe they didn't get quite all the fuel they should have, but for sure they did get paid at least partially.

wat10000  3 months ago

The US did not agree to protect them. The signatures to the Budapest Memorandum agreed to respect Ukraine's sovereignty. Of the signatories, Russia is the only one that has violated the agreement.

  • HappyPanacea  3 months ago

    Are you sure about that? Wikipedia says the following: "

    3. Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.

    4. Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".

    Both seems to not happen as stipulated.

    Edit: I didn't read properly, 4 obviously didn't happen, my bad.

  • blibble  3 months ago

    the US trying to coerce Ukraine into surrendering territory, and then having to pay the US to do it is a violation of their sovereignty