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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

"Now it will be a lesson for others: nukes are way more reliable than some piece of paper, which no one is gonna follow"

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.

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> Even if Ukraine had nukes, would it have threatened and actually have the will to use it over the lost of the Crimea?

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.

"Nation-state" is not another way to say "country". The Russian federation, for instance, isn't a nation state.

So what would Ukraine have done if they had nukes? Nuked the enemy troops in the Crimaea, with their own population in the way? Or bomb some Russian city and start a nuclear war ...against the second larges nuclear power?

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 difference is deterrence: Russia would have thought twice before invading a nuclear-armed neighbour.

Thought twice, and then done the same thing anyway.

Nope. There is no precedent for invading a nuclear armed state. So much can go wrong so fast that diplomacy is always preferred to war. Isn't it wonderful what a little nuclear leverage can do for you ?

>There is no precedent for invading a nuclear armed state.

The Argentine invasion of the Falklands might be considered an exception to that.

Ukraine doesn't consider Crimea inhabitants Ukrainians. They call them traitors and hate them (it's not an official position, just guessing from comments in social media - if you can read Russian, you'll find such comments easily)

They never were Ukrainians - they were an autonomous republic since '54 for a reason.

Even the 1954 transfer was only 'administrative'. By all accounts, Ukraine should not have kept Crimea in 1991.

>paper-thin cover story?

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.

That logic would justify quite a few invasions.

If the invasion involved limited or no violence and ended up with a democratic vote that was otherwise going to be suppressed, I'm not so sure that's such a bad thing.

The inability for countries to peacefully reorganise themselves with clear democratic mandates, both enabling the rights of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority, is a major problem, and one that could well define the 21st century.

> The conflict was low intensity warfare, which nukes are not particularly well suited for.

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.

China, India and Pakistan, all three of them nuclear powers, have been fighting a low-level conflict over Kashmir for several decades. So far none of them has nuked the others.

Presumably, they realise the consequences of dropping a nuclear bomb in a region of the world with a couple billion people or three.

Didn't know much about this conflict, thank you for educating me. One other difference between those combatants and a theoretically nuclear armed Ukraine is that that war is more widely seem as an existential threat to an independent Ukraine. Kashmir political disagreement seems to rest on somewhat more limited territorial claims versus the desire of one party to post its military inside the other as well as to exert widespread political influence.

And no one has lost any territory to the other since they developed nuclear weapons. All conventional millitary conflicts date from before they became nuclear powers.

The Sino-Soviet border conflict occured after both were nuclear powers, as did the Kargil War between India and Pakistan.

India lost territory to China after both had nuclear weapons.

Ukraine couldn't have used the threat of nukes WRT Crimea. It happened too fast (IIRC Russians used old school messengers to avoid Western SIGINT), and at least the majority of the population supported or did not actively oppose them (e.g. Ukrainian generals defecting to the Russians)

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.

The utility of nuclear weapons is strategic, not tactical. The only relevant deterrent is their use against against major cities for which speed is not really relevant. What's relevant is maintaining launch capability in your control - hence major powers go for stealthy submarine platforms.

They couldn't launch them anyway, its the same as US nukes in Turkey.

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