Hey it's not all bad, we managed to convince Ukraine to destroy their nuclear weapons and it worked out really well for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
Is it really though? Even if Ukraine had nukes, would it have threatened and actually have the will to use it over the lost of the Crimea? The conflict was low intensity warfare, which nukes are not particularly well suited for. I don't think nukes are the be-all-end-all weapons people think they are. There are huge consequences to using them, especially against another nuclear power.
Over a conventional invasion by a neighboring nation-state with massive conventional superiority with a paper-thin cover story?
Probably. I mean, that’s why the USSR didn't pull that stunt against any of the NATO countries bordering its satellites, ever, even though they did similar things to other neighbors. And those bordering states were merely allies of the nuclear powers, not nuclear powers themselves.
Crimea is 70% ethnically Russian and the majority wanted to become part of Russia. Russia invaded and held a vote. Ukraine's response to that was that the vote should not have happened not because it was undemocratic, but because it was unconstitutional.
Their story was pretty solid.
Honestly, use of nuclear weapons just sounds like pure madness, no matter what the threat one is under. I mean, unless we're talking about an alien invasion (and I'm not impartial to keeping around a few nukes just in case that ever happens).
The Argentine invasion of the Falklands might be considered an exception to that.
Even the 1954 transfer was only 'administrative'. By all accounts, Ukraine should not have kept Crimea in 1991.
Firstly "was" is not the right word, the war is ongoing: http://tass.com/world/965974
Secondly, imo the nature of the conflict is less important than whether a concentrated population of the adversary's citizens are within range of the weapon as far as determining the effectiveness of nuclear deterrent.
> Even if Ukraine had nukes, would it have threatened and actually have the will to use it over the lost of the Crimea?
Would those that made the decision to invade have accepted the risk of even the most minute possibility? No leader has done that so far.
Presumably, they realise the consequences of dropping a nuclear bomb in a region of the world with a couple billion people or three.
It's another story WRT to Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine's military units had poor morale and were repeatedly destroyed by regular Russian soldiers AKA "volunteers". The time frame is not days as in Crimea. Perhaps the threat of nukes would have stopped Russian tanks and soldiers from "volunteering" in Ukraine.
It is now up to the armchair historians and alt-history writers to contemplate the what-ifs.
However, some are arguing that this view is incorrect - there's a paper linked on the wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Ukraine#De...
Yeah, but the US got the Ukrainian gold.
There's an illusion of the utility of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons might be OK if you want to destroy masses of conventional armies or destroy the ability of an enemy fighting a heavily industrialized conventional form of war. Unless the destructive power of nukes fit into your overall strategy, it's better not to have them or waste the resources developing them (along with the risk of sanctions, etc.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-risk-of-nu...
The answer you are referring to is explicitly mentioned.
The US/UN enforces then pushed the North Korean forces back north and to the brink of destruction. Then Chinese (and to a much lesser degree Soviet) forces intervened on behalf of North Korea and pushed US/UN forces back beginning a sort of see-saw that ended up with neither coalition able to make meaningful progress. After some time of a back and forth, an armistice was signed.
I think it's somewhat unclear how the balance of powers changed in the time after this.
The speculation I've heard (on radio, so I cannot paste a link) is that NK analysis is roughly: NK's regime is safe as long as China sees it as useful (probably using NK as some sort of buffer state against US), but sooner or later that support will end. Then only nuclear weapons will ensure NK's regime survival. It's rational, though again just speculation.
The contradiction, or maybe unintended side effect, is that the developing of nuclear weapons itself is causing China to rethink its support of NK regime...
Kim's goals are:
1. Survival of the Kim leadership 2. Reunification of Korea
To achieve the latter (and also the prior), he needs to remove the US from intervening in any conflict on the Korean peninsula. If he had a credible threat to any major US city, then the US would have to weight the freedom of S. Korea vs. the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
At this point we have to assume North Korea will soon have dozens of nuclear weapons (basically as many as they can manage to make), and in a few years that they'll have dozens capable of being placed on an ICBM that can hit most US cities. Their progress has accelerated dramatically, that will probably make such numbers very feasible.
Now, following the premise of keeping the US out of it by way of the risk that the US will lose several or more of its major cities. Here's the problem. If the US loses a dozen of its major cities, we'll destroy China in retaliation for making the North Korea situation possible to begin with. There's no scenario where the US just absorbs that kind of vast destruction, trades nukes with North Korea and says: oh well, woe is me. China will lose hundreds of millions of its people - Beijing, Shanghai, etc - if the US sees its biggest cities nuked. The American public will demand all enablers of North Korea be held accountable, it'll lead to the classic global nuclear war scenario, a billion people die.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2n916d
It never makes sense to use nuclear weapons. My favourite thing about the nuclear chain of command is how many humans are involved.
If the US loses one city, that'll be an extreme tragedy that the US can absorb, while obliterating NK in response.
If the US loses its top dozen (or more) cities in a nuclear exchange with North Korea, there's no scenario under which the American public won't demand retribution against the enabling power/s that made that outcome possible. China would be guaranteed to get nuked as a consequence, given its responsibility for propping up and nurturing the Kim dynasty. If the US loses half of its civilization, it will respond exactly as one might expect.
You can't actually think the American public is going to sit on its collective hands and suffer its outcome quietly? That they'd be ok with trading NY, LA, SF, Seattle, Houston, Washington DC, et al. for Pyongyang and call it a day, while China goes on about its business, its civilization unscathed, like its actions over five decades didn't make the North Korean threat what it was. If it weren't for China, the US would have destroyed the Kim dynasty during the Korean War and unified Korea. They're responsible in every possible way for what North Korea is today, they propped them up and supported each regime with full understanding of what was going on in regards to the North's nuclear program across decades. Even if I don't agree with that premise, of holding China accountable in such a way, you can bet a just-been-nuked-40-times American public will, they'll ask a simple question: who has been North Korea's primary supporting ally?
Also, I’ve seen MASH. The US’s pointless war was as responsible for North Korea as anything else.
Anyway, I really doubt there will ever be significant popular demand for nuclear war.
MASH the film or MASH the TV series? Both are comedies, and both are loosely based on “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors”, which is a memoir.
Edit: Thanks for the downvote, Stranger. Here's a citation. http://www.history.com/topics/korean-war
Adventured
But when you stop and think about it, MAD kept the world safe for 60+ years.
It's a bit paradoxical that the most powerful bomb and the doctorine named after the word "insanity" achieved (relative) world peace.
"Peacemaker" ICBM and "Peace is Our Profession" from Dr Strangelove comes to mind.
This is hardly a secret and a retaliatory strike from Libya would have been justified. And ultimately that's what nukes provide. North Korea is not deterring a US invasion by threatening to nuke our invading soldiers. They're deterring an invasion by implicitly threatening to nuke South Korea. If the US invaded North Korea and it ended up costing millons of lives and billions/trillions of damage in South Korea, the responsibility for that change would lay with the US as they threw the first punch. On the other hand, if North Korea engaged in any substantial preemptive attack themselves - then any loss of life could be argued as saving even more lives; similar to how we ended WW2 by nuking hundreds of thousands of otherwise innocent civilians.
[1] - https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09TRIPOLI677_a.html
prevent the US from intervening/preventing him from putting down internal rebellions. the risk of nuclear escalation gives you a much greater license to do things that fly in the face of international conventions.