Comment by adolph
7 days ago
Counterpoint is that Ukraine, Qaddafi, and Assad already demonstrated the significance of maintaining certain capabilities. Vzla didn't have those capabilities before, much less publicly depreciate them.
7 days ago
Counterpoint is that Ukraine, Qaddafi, and Assad already demonstrated the significance of maintaining certain capabilities. Vzla didn't have those capabilities before, much less publicly depreciate them.
Ukraine wouldn’t have been invaded if they hadn’t given up their nuclear weapons.
I have a few questions about that:
1. Did Ukraine control the nukes, or did Russia?
2. Could Ukraine keep them working on its own?
3. If nukes stop invasions, why do nuclear countries still get attacked?
1) It's complex. Formally, Moscow controlled the launch codes. However Ukraine designed and built the ICBMs, and are near the top of nations with the highest nuclear physicist per capita ratio.
On top of that the Soviet nuclear lockout systems are rumored to be much simpler than the American ones. Whereas the American system is rumored to be something like the decryption key for the detonation timings (without which you have at best a dirty bomb), the Soviet lockout mechanism is rumored to just be a lockout device with a 'is locked' signal going to the physics package. If that's all true, taking control of those nukes from a technical perspective would be on the order of hotwiring a 1950s automobile.
Taking physical control would have been more complex, but everything was both more complex and in some ways a lot simpler as the wall fell. It would have ultimately been a negotiation.
2) See above.
3) Which military nuclear power has been attacked by the kind of adversary that you can throw a nuke at? Yes, it doesn't remove all threats, but no solution does. Removing a class of threat (and arguably the most powerful class of threat in concrete terms) is extremely valuable.
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Has any nuclear state had their leader kidnapped? Or seen significant incursions?
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Alternatively, we might have entered either a limited or a worst-case nuclear war scenario.
Russia may have just continually pushed the envelope until it became clear there wasn't a bright red line, and eventually someone would push the button.
The psychopaths in charge of Russia still like living comfortably.
Russia promised not to invade if Ukraine gave up the nukes.
To be the devil's advocate, I don't think Russia foresaw a situation that had Ukraine looking to join NATO right after NATO had been used offensively for the first time ever to put its thumb on the scale of a civil war that didn't involve NATO countries.
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No no no, some random American diplomat told a random Soviet diplomat during the East Germany negotiations that NATO wouldn't extend east at all.
No, it wasn't put on paper anywhere.
No, it wasn't mentioned (much) when the countries of eastern Europe all chomped at the bit to join NATO in the 90s.
No, it completely makes the Budapest Memorandum bunk.
No, the people of Ukraine absolutely do not have the agency to want to pivot towards the EU and become wealthy and stable like the former Warsaw Pact countries did. It must have been the CIA, so Budapest is bunk again!
(and other lies the war apologists tell themselves)
Even setting aside that Ukraine never had the technical means or infrastructure to operate/maintain those weapons, I don't think they would have dissuaded Russia or actually been used. Russia could turn them into a wasteland in response and 6 million people (including hundreds of thousands of men of military age) weren't even willing to stay in Ukraine, much less fight for the country. If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
You don't think that Ukraine, the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?
And the point of nukes isn't to launch them. By then you've already lost, you're just making good on your offer to make the other shmuck lose too.
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The idea that a nation state could not make use of the hundreds of nuclear weapons in its territory is just absurd. It's sillier than the people that think disk encryption will spare them the crowbar to the face. Beyond the whole chauvinistic idea that it was "Russians" that built them in the first place.
> If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
Do you understand that nuclear weapons don't work like that, and leaders with nuclear buttons give orders to launch nuclear weapons every few months? And only they know they're using a training launch code; everyone else finds that out when the missiles does not fly off at the end of the launch sequence.
Zelensky is far too concerned with the human costs of war to use nukes, even if he could. He doesn’t have a napoleon complex.
Human costs of war is precisely the reason to use nukes.
Why not?
Russia invades. Ukraine launches nukes. Every major city in Ukraine is ash. Several major cities in Russia are ash. Millions die plausibly.
That scenario is not what would happen from an invasion.
Zelensky would not have used nukes to prompt the death of millions instantly. He would have proceeded with the same defensive war.
The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded.
All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation? Obviously not what the masses would have chosen (just look at what they did choose to do while living under Russian occupation - how many gave up their lives to fight back?). It's fundamentally why nuclear weapons as deterrant is largely fraudulent. They're solely viable as a last option against total oblivion at the hands of an enemy: it entails everyone dies, which means there has to be a good enough reason for everyone to die to justify use.
> All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation?
As someone from a country that used to be under russia n boot - the fireball is preferable.
This isn’t how nukes would get used. They wouldn’t just fire them at cities to start with. It would most likely be something tactical, but perhaps end up escalating to insanity anyway
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Or, MAD means that neither a nuke launch or an invasion happen in the first place.
Your comment highlights some tensions in deterrence theory, but it also oversimplifies over a few things.
If you notice, most countries with nuclear weapons also have published and publicized nuclear use policies. These documents usually highlight lines and conditions under which they will consider the use of nuclear weapons. This is by design. Ambiguity in nuclear policy invites miscalculation. Of course, you don't want complete certainty, lest you risk your enemy push right up to your line and no further; you want your lines defined, but a little blurry, so that the enemy is afraid to approach, much less cross. This is called strategic ambiguity. This is why Russia has been criticized a lot by policy experts for their repeated nuclear saber-rattling. They're making the line too blurry, and so Ukraine and their allies risk crossing that line accidentally, triggering something nobody truly wants to trigger.
In the case of a nuclear-armed Ukraine, given Russia's tendency to like to take over neighboring countries, they could include "threats to territorial integrity" as a threshold for going nuclear. They could also be a little more 'reasonable' and include "existential threat to the state" - which the initial 2022 invasion very much would fit.
What this looks like in practice is that Russia, in their calculations, would factor in the risk of triggering a nuclear response if they tried to take Ukrainian territory. Now, they may believe, as you seem to, that Ukraine would not risk the annihilation of its people over Crimea/Donbas. At which point, Russia would invade, and then Ukraine would have to decide. If Ukraine does not escalate, then they will lose deterrence and credibility for any future conflicts, assuming they survive as a state. If Ukraine does escalate, announces to Russia they will launch a nuclear attack to establish deterrence (reducing ambiguity that this is a full nuclear exchange), and then launches a single low-yield nuke at Russian invading troops, they place the ball back in Russia's court: Ukraine is clearly willing to employ nukes in this war - do you believe they won't escalate further, or do you believe they will launch their full arsenal if you continue?
This is essentially a simplified version of deterrence theory. The idea is to give the other side all possible opportunities to de-escalate and prevent a full nuclear exchange. If you do not back up your policy with actual teeth - by using nukes when you said you would - you're signalling something very dangerous.
This is also why nuclear-armed states do not tend to rely solely on their nuclear deterrence. They want a solid layer of conventional capabilities before they have to resort to their proverbial nuclear button. A strong conventional force keeps conflicts below the nuclear threshold, where deterrence theory tends to get very dangerous, very fast.
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>The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded.
Well, Russian occupation usually means your town slowly undergoes mass extermination and genocide....
so yes? nuclear fireball is potentially preferred