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Good lord I’ve heard before about how there was a close superpower conflict in 1973. This is very alarming, and it could still happen between the US and Russia or China.

We’re really playing with Fire if you look at the number of close calls there have been with nuclear weapons. The only sane way we can carry on guaranteeing a decent existence for mankind is to work towards a world free of nuclear weapons.

https://www.upi.com/Yom-Kippur-Israels-1973-nuclear-alert/64...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban-...

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It's impossible to build a world free of nuclear weapons. A lot more countries will have them in the future, not fewer.

North Korea, the poorest country on earth, has demonstrated how it can be done by anyone. Before that Pakistan and India demonstrated how easily it can be done with minimal consequences.

Poor and small nations will always be at an extreme disadvantage when it comes to conventional military conflict. Taiwan would love nothing more than to have a 100 nuke stockpile right now, it's the only way they don't get invaded and annexed by China against their will. There is nothing that can stop China as things are today, the US isn't going to commit suicide to save them from annexation. Those nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrence when facing off with an overwhelming opponent, another thing North Korea correctly figured out.

There's no scenario where countries like Pakistan or North Korea don't pursue nuclear weapons to compensate for their weakness or specific context. To say nothing of that pursuit on the basis of conquering rivals or ensuring dictatorships or kingdoms.

Iran is guaranteed to acquire nukes in the near future, both for their desire to be able to stand-off with Israel on an equal footing and to deter the US. Iran can't fight with the US in a conventional manner at all, the US can disable their entire economy and take down their air force and navy without ever invading. There's one tangible solution from their point of view.

If you're Vietnam, and China becomes a monster bent on conquering Asia, with a $40 trillion economy and an unlimited supply of soldiers, how do you stop them from taking your country? There's one answer.

Until there are no very powerful military nations, and all nations have similar numbers of soldiers, budgets and hardware, nuclear weapons will remain desirable for defensive purposes if nothing else.

>North Korea, the poorest country on earth, has demonstrated how it can be done by anyone.

North Korea is not even close to being as poor as the reputation bestowed upon it by the US establishment.

If it were, space rockets and nukes would simply have been out of the question (as they were in the 90s). You don't tend to find the best rocket scientists living in mud huts.

It's still hardly a rich country but industrially they're surprisingly profligate and while their famous famine weighs heavily upon them (esp. in the form of stunted heights) it was 25 years ago. About the only thing there is still a massive, visceral shortage of is oil (because embargoes).

Welp, we posted an almost identical comment at the same time.

haha so we did.

did you visit too?

Unfortunately not, but I'd love to in the near future. What was your experience on the ground?

No, they are fairly poor. Just look at the GDP list from the United Nations in 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... I'm sure it's worse now at the embargoes have really started to bite. It looks like they may be dropping their nuclear weapons, which if done, most of the sanctions would probably be dropped.

But there's a difference between being middle of the pack (113/211) and being one of the poorest countries. I'd also argue that GDP isn't a great measure of NK's wealth.

Those numbers are a joke. They're the most secretive country in the world and they don't really share economic data. It really can't be overstated just how much wild guesswork is involved in coming up with those figures.

An economist weighs in here: https://www.38north.org/2012/07/rfrank071612/

Moreover, most institutions will systematically under rather than overestimate their economic activity from what scraps of data they do have. You wouldn't, after all, win political capital in the UN or the CIA by declaring the north korean economic model to be more successful than it really is... nobody wants to hear that.

North Korea is not dropping it's nuclear weapons. No country that has ever tested 1 weapon- leave alone 6, and gotten to quite sophisticated designs- has ever given them up, and North Korea will not be the first.

Also, the embargoes are weaker now than they were a year ago, so I'm not sure that I would say that they have really started to bite. China and Russia both backed off the pressure after the Singapore summit, and their cooperation is essential for an effective embargo.

# No country that has ever tested 1 weapon- leave alone 6, and gotten to quite sophisticated designs- has ever given them up

South Africa did give up its nuclear weapons. Complete disarmament.

Number of tests South Africa conducted[1]: 0 Number of levitated pits that South Africa tested: 0

I don't know why you think this comment was disagreeing with what I said.

[1]: Like most observers today, I think that the Vela Incident was not a RSA test. I tend to think it was not a nuclear test at all, which does differ from the majority opinion.

> North Korea, the poorest country on earth,...

North Korea is not even close to being the poorest country on Earth. That’s your bias showing.

South Africa had a successful nuclear weapons program that they chose to dismantle, so it's not an inevitability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...

South Africa has some distinct geopolitical advantages not shared by Pakistan, North Korea, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, etc.

They're not technically at war with a nuclear-armed power (North Korea). They're not faced with a neighbor with incalculable manpower advantages (India, Pakistan) or nuclear weapons (same).

Anyway, I would characterize South Africa as a unique situation vs a reason for optimism, but I'm also deeply pessimistic about nearly everything.

Is South Africa's situation really that unique when most of the world isn't at war with a neighbour?

If anything, the situation in Pakistan, North Korea, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel etc. are the unique cases - that is essentially a whose-who of regional conflicts

I'll grant that most of the world is at relative peace, but as long as a few feel that their existence is at risk, it will be nearly impossible to get rid of nuclear weapons, which was the original point.

South Africa shows that a country can get rid of its weapons, but it's not a particularly relevant example to those that still have them, or are likely to add them.

There's also the point that a lot of countries aren't at war precisely because they and/or their opponents have nukes. If the nukes disappeared then so would the reasons for the cease fire.

South Africa dismantled their program because the ruling white minority- watching de Klerk negotiate with Mandela to end Apartheid- didn't trust the ANC (read: Nelson Mandela) to have nuclear weapons. Absent that political handover, I'm not sure that they would ever have dismantled the program. It is hard to destroy military-industrial bureaucracies, once created and given resources.

I know - but that wasn't the argument being made

It is relevant though, because the political calculus between South Africa and its neighbors changed with the handover to the ANC. There were a lot of skirmishes between South Africa's apartheid government and its neighbors that supported/harbored the ANC military wing. Asking why South Africa developed nukes in the first place and why it voluntarily gave them up can provide a useful template for denuclearization.

Aside: the fissile material is still stockpiled and there was a break-in attempt at the storage facility a few years ago

It is possible but it would mean everyone should agree to dismantle them. It would have to mean citizentry stopping this military madness. The US as global military hegemon would have to be part of that.

It's not that easy. Verification is a big deal. And not just verification of disarmament, but verification and controls to prevent re-armament.

The world is awash in Plutonium, sadly.

There are a great many nuclear power stations producing Plutonium. Japan and SK can easily make nuclear weapons on short notice with barely anyone noticing, and they're not the only ones -- I'm sure Germany could too, and perhaps also Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and others.

A wholesale switch to Thorium reactors and/or dismantling of all Uranium-/Plutonium-burning reactors would be needed too.

And even then, we'd need controls on the unavoidably huge stockpiles of Uranium and Plutonium. And the Uranium mines would have to be demonstrably shut down and controlled.

It would be fantastically easier to... have just a few nuclear-armed superpowers enforcing a no-new-membership rule for the world's nuclear club. This should be a LOT easier to agree to... and yet here we are with Russia and China (and the EU!) cheering Iran and NK on!!

So you see, we can't globally agree even to the easy measures that would reduce the risk of nuclear war. How will we even get to disarmament then?

To actually get global nuclear disarmament would be oh so much harder than that still. That makes unilateral nuclear disarmament a non-starter.

The best case scenario right now is that we get no new nuclear-armed states after NK (and Iran, which I presume has nukes now), and even that is in doubt. If the U.S. were to intervene in any other aspiring new nuclear club members... the lesson to draw would be: develop nukes really fast, fast enough to get inside the American political OODA loop and make one's nuclear status a fait accompli. If the U.S. does not intervene... then the lesson will be: every country can and should develop nuclear weapons. That all means that the worst-case scenario right now is a stampede to join the nuclear club. Saudi Arabia? Egypt? Brazil? Chile? Vietnam? SK? Japan? Philippines? All of them will find reasons to develop nukes very soon.

So you see, it really is impossible -- at least for a fairly long forseeable future -- to get nuclear disarmament. It's all going to get much worse before it gets better. In that context simply making sure MAD does not stop working (due to plausible deniability from having so many nuclear-armed countries) becomes the highest priority and the best possible outcome for a long, long time.

Hate to be a pessimist. But really, nuclear weapons policy requires realism.

If you want nuclear disarmament, then perhaps the only thing you can do right now is hope that the Trump administration and, if need be, its successors, make progress on disarming NK and Iran. Then and only then will the slide towards more and more nuclear-armed nations stop (at least for a while). Then and only then can we discuss measures to begin disarming existing nuclear club members.

To be fair, North Korea bought a lot of their nuclear technology from Pakistan, which stole some of it from a European civilian nuclear program. But you're right that it's relatively easy if a country has the will, money, and other resources to put into a nuclear program. South Africa did it even while facing heavy sanctions.

Agreed.

Nuclear weapons are equalizers among nations like handguns are equalizers among men. The people most vulnerable don't want to be picked on so they arm themselves if they can. Big nations pick on small nations when they know they won't get hurt doing so. Look at Iraq and Libya.

Libya is an especially good example, since it had a fairly advanced nuclear program at one point but gave it up.

Keep going. Then what happened...?

Ah, yes, Obama and Clinton went in, they saw, and they killed Qaddafi. The man surely deserved it, but! But he had made a deal with Bush 43 that needed to be respected so that others in the future too might pick a nuclear-free policy.

Obama single-handedly made the world a more dangerous place by killing Qaddafi. He made it that much more difficult for his successors (not just Trump) to negotiate nuclear disarmament with NK or Iran, for example, though in the future there will likely be others too. To think, Obama won a Nobel peace prize...

I wish sober people had argued this -and prevailed- at the time. I don't know, really, why the Libya adventure happened. It shouldn't have. I wonder if Bush 43 tried to get Obama to not do it, and if so, I wonder why Obama went ahead anyways.

It was an intervention in the Libyan civil war by 19 countries. And Gaddafi was killed by Libyan rebels. Blaming Obama as "single handedly" killing Gaddafi is anti-historical, you also left out that the outcome Obama considered to be his biggest regret.

And what nuclear disarmament with Iran? They're already disarmed. All of the highly enriched uranium has been given up. The JCPOA was specifically designed with the expectation of Iran cheating. That unilateral withdrawal is far worse for nuclear non-proliferation going forward. But this is completely consistent with John Bolton who was likewise involved when DPRK withdrew from the NPT. But it's OK, we have a "very stable genius" in office who can only make himself look better by saying everyone else over the past 50 years has done a terrible job, and will never admit he made a mistake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y

We actually have slowly begun having less and less nuclear weapons, you just don't hear about it

https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Stockpile-History...

It’s still plenty enough to destroy the world. We’re still spending money to modernize nuclear weapons, and now Russia and China are too, a logical response.

This is true, but once you start looking into it is highly misleading. A huge (and maybe only) reason for this is advances in targeting systems.

In the 70s and 80s targeting systems were much worse, so you might expect to send tens of nukes to destroy a single reinforced bunker, since many would miss by hundreds of meters to kilometers. So often you needed tens of nukes for a single strategic target.

Nowadays targeting systems are so good and launch / reentry vehicles so reliable that a single nuke can hit exactly in the right x-y coordinate and in the exact z coordinate sweetspot to destroy that bunker. So you don't need as many.

So the number of nukes has gone down, but the destructive power is quite similar, although I suppose in the event of an all-out war we'll have less fallout.

Fallout is really bad. Radiation goes from a high lifetime cancer risk to LD 50/50 over a narrow (in exponential terms) band so twice the fallout can quickly kill a lot more people.

Nukes really don't destroy that much land directly, the difference with nuclear war over regular ones is mostly just the fallout.

The people intuitively scale up Hiroshima and say it's 1,000x as strong so it destroys 1,000x the area. But, it's non linear the giant hot ball of gas quickly gains altitude. Sure, the center get's more energy but it was destroyed anyway.

Also, the atmosphere cuts radiation exponentially with distance. So, if you block 1/2 the radiation at X, then you get 1/4 at 2x and 1/8th at 3x. Thus doubling only increases the lethal radius by X rather than say 5x which is the original lethal radius. (Note it's more complex as radius also reduces the received dose directly, and radiation turns into heat etc.)

PS: You can estimate direct damage as ~10000 * ~100 square miles (most nukes are sub 1MT) ~= 1 million square miles. But, the earth has 57 million square miles of land. So ~2% of total land though much of this would be over water as many cities are coastal. So, if you could ignore fallout and each nuke was targeting something else most land would still be untouched.

The ideal outcome of a nuclear war would be an exchange that destroys all military installations of all sides with the smallest nessesary nukes and no civilian casulties. In that sense, increased targeting capabilities are great.

Now we just need to work on not targeting civilians, not destroying the electrical grid, minimizing fallout etc.

That defeats the purpose of MAD and makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely. If the response to a nuclear attack is devastating then there is less chance that one will attack in the first place.

I firmly believe nukes are the reason we haven't had world war 3 yet. If no nukes existed the USA and the USSR would have gone at it in the 60s/70s.

I agree. I have no background in military strategy so I try not to feel too comfortable in making conclusions about warfare tactics, but it seems like the reason we haven't had a classic major land war between two superpowers since WWII seems to be because of nuclear weapons.

MAD ( countervalue ) was discontinued as a policy under President Carter when Poseidon & Minuteman III made counterforce viable.

The Soviets made a similar transition, moving away from city-crushing 25MT unitary warheards to much smaller silo-busting MIRVs.

MAD did its job through the 60s but faded away as technology improved.

Is not the purpose of weapon of mass descruction to destruct as much as possible? This includes not only cities, factories and civilians, but for example, polluting soil with radioactive materials so that it becomes unusable for living. Don't forget that civilians are potential soldiers, guerilla warriors or military factory workers so it doesn't make sense to leave them alive.

If you need to destroy a military base or a factory, you can just use non-nuclear weapon.

I think the main targets for ICBMs are densely populated cities or areas. So large countries have much higher chances to survive while overpopulated European countries, or East Asian countries can be severely destroyed.

>This is true, but once you start looking into it is highly misleading. A huge (and maybe only) reason for this is advances in targeting systems.

Yes, and Khrushev singlehandedly conducted a psy-op, ingraining the concept of "missile gap" into psyche of American political establishment.

At the time when ICBMs were still toy weapons, he successfully pushed NATO nations into spending enormous resources bringing up their strategic nuclear forces, while the bloc was popping T55s by thousands every week.

On a macro scale, all an every "lateral movements" were nothing but a ruse, disguising the fact that the only strategy he had was to send a patently enormous mechanised force over a wide front.

The more remarkable was, that, I think, that every military analyst pentagon had was coming to this very conclusion very easy, but none of them were ever heard in white house or by higher up generals.

Big name generals were themselves convinced that all of that itself was a ruse, and that Khrushev had a secret joker in his pocket, and that he will not resort to the most straightforward way to defeat them.

And American presidents, of course, only wanted to hear an opinion that was easier to believe in, coinciding with their own view of the world. What they believed in? They believed in a vision of a clean and fast war, where enemies are instantly vapourised at a click of a big red button.

"So the number of nukes has gone down, but the destructive power is quite similar" is very, very false.

The military efficiency is quite similar, however, the destructive power has dropped significantly - these targeting improvements resulted in much less powerful warheads being necessary to achieve the same goal, so not only there's much, much less warheads (10000 vs 60000 at the height of cold war, and "only" 3000 of those 10000 are available at short notice) but also each warhead is much less destructive, the "default" warheads have gone down from multiple megatons to 100-150 kilotons.

This means that an all-out war will not only have much less fallout than in 70s, but also much less civilian casualties, much less destruction of cities, etc, etc. In the 70s, if a military base near a city would be targeted, then the city would be eliminated along with the base; now it'd likely be targeted with just something like 100kt bomb with much smaller impact; if the target was in the middle of the city, then most of the city would survive.

It is still perverse that we allow some few countries to stockpile 100 of thousands of Nagasakis. All of the world is held hostage to the whim of a hand full old men in the US, China and Russia.

A big reason why this stockpile is considered necessary is to prevent questions in the form of "why should we allow ..." - if you have such a stockpile, then the obvious answer to any such questions is that you don't have to ask for permission for anything ever, as nobody can force you to do anything or prevent you from doing what you want, you have the ability to not care about what someone would "allow" you to do. This is the ultimate guarantee of "noone orders me around" sovereignty; if it was technically possible for the world to disallow USA, Russia or China "to stockpile 100 of thousands of Nagasakis", then it might become possible for the world to disallow USA, Russia or China some other actions against other countries or their own people, and that's not acceptable to their leaders.

It's good that you make the distinction between leaders and population, because when it comes to nuclear weapons we are all losers.

“allow”?

That is a really interesting point. We've been so conditioned that nuclear war == "end of humanity" that if it happened as you described, everyone would lose their minds for no real reason (inasmuch as the consequences would be no worse than for a conventional war).

But taking that further, what is the point then, of taking out your enemy's bases or bunkers? I realize how dense that question sounds. But in the context of a surgical nuclear strike, ok you wiped most of their airbases off the face of the earth...now what?

It seems rather pointless unless you intend to actually invade, in which case you're in for millions of very hostile civilians and not much to gain

The hostility can be dealt with, if you are sufficiently bestial. Reinhard Heydrich did suppress the resistance in Czechoslovakia, and the reprisals after his assassination convinced Allied leadership never to mount another assassination attempt of Nazi top brass.

Thank you for mentioning this. It is an astonishing story that I did not know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich#Assassinatio...

The realistic scenarios of nuclear war occur as an escalation of some large scale conventional conflict.

If you take out enemy airbases and nuclear capability, then you can use tactical nukes (or, more likely, you already started using them) to win that conventional war and achieve whatever goals you had in it. There's no reason to invade - just as with Japan in 1945, you can subjugate a country without invading it

That would seem to indicate that reducing civilian loss wouldn't be a likely result of targeting improvements. After all, we ended the war in Japan by intentionally inflicting civilian casualties to force surrender. Seems likely future leaders would make the same calculation. So, the strategy would likely involve destroying the opponent's ability to retaliate add then start massacring civilians until you get an unconventional surrender.

Carpet bombing failed to undermine morale both in Britain and Germany. Here's an anecdote: the village priest when I was little lived through WW II and was a pacifist, a serious one, but he had a vicious hatred for Bomber-Harris, as he was called.

For the lazy like me, here's wikipedia's article on sir Arthur "bomber" Harris:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Arthur_Harris,_1st_Baronet

I'm not terribly comforted by this. The outcome would still be a disaster on a scale never seen before, and would wreck modern civilization.

It baffles me how the threat of nuclear war has essentially disappeared from the public consciousness. People seem to think that the danger evaporated with the USSR, but it's still there, as likely as it ever was, quite possibly more so now that there are so many more nuclear powers.

This is mostly wrong.

For a period accuracy on ICBMs wasn't very great (on the order of a kilometer), which is why they made use of very high yield weapons in the several megaton range. Large warheads were necessary to take out targets (such as population centers) with those accuracy levels. Then several things changed: accuracy improved greatly, the ability to put multiple warheads on a single missile arrived (MIRVing), and anti-ballistic missile defense (ABM) started taking off. This lead to the use of more, higher accuracy, lower yield warheads to take out targets. You could blanket a city with sub-megaton MIRVed warheads instead of using one big 10 megaton bomb. And then the calculus of "but how many will be lost to the ABM systems?" came into play, which resulted in use of "penetration aids" like decoys as well as the deployment of vast numbers of warheads to ensure enough of them made it through. That led to a massive rapid escalation in warhead deployment during the '60s and '70s until the ABM treaty flattened it out.

But this is only half the story. The other half is the massive deployment of tactical (battlefield) nukes. With the invention of smaller nuclear warheads combined with the massive production capability of the weapons procurement pipelines in the US and USSR it became possible to deploy tens of thousands of tactical warheads. These would be used for everything from anti-ship missiles and torpedoes to anti-aircraft weapons to short range ground strike missiles.

The late Cold War and post Cold War arms limitations significantly reduced the deployed number of warheads of both the US and USSR. They massively curtailed the number of tactical nukes deployed, and they resulted in a lot of "de-MIRVing" of missiles. A modern Ohio-class nuclear missile submarine can carry 24 missiles each of which can carry up to 12 W-88 (475 Kt) warheads. Potentially that's up to 288 warheads and over 130 megatons of total destructive power, basically WWIII in a can. However, today they carry far fewer warheads than that due to treaty limitations. Similarly, most of our land based ICBMs have been de-MIRVed and we've retired new weapons systems (like the MX/Peacekeeper) which were heavily MIRVed.

All of this has translated into far fewer warheads in service or on alert and a much reduced overall destructive capability. It is still an overwhelmingly enormous nuclear destructive capability but it has been reduced significantly through treaty obligations over the years.

To be more precise, recent improvements in hard target kill probabilities are actually due to improvements in fuzing rather than improvements in targeting. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a rather good article describing the tech and its strategic implications: https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

The targeting systems from the 70s 80s were good enough to be in use still today because as far as the nuclear arsenal goes they are.

Don’t confuse the development of guided conventional munitions with nuclear ones it’s a completely different ball game.

Costs and size don’t mean much for nukes, nukes also can’t use GPS, CCD sensor or any other “modern” guidance system due to reentry and many other factors.

Are they? Without GPS? How I wonder?

Because the US will disable GPS for everyone but their own forces in a heartbeat in the event of war.

And China / Russia might be able to knock out US GPS pretty quickly - but all of that is very untested, moreover, the US may have a way to put up a bunch more satellites quickly.

Systems today have become really, really dependant on technologies that may not be available in a time of war.

It may very well could be that if the US has their act together they could shut down an advanced opponent pretty quickly without having to do much at all.

I'm actually pretty curious as to how advanced guidance systems would work in 2018 without GPS like technologies, not just in 'known tech' but behind the scenes, all the secret stuff.

It's hard because in some ways we could expect them to be way, way ahead with some things, but in others, they might be blindingly incompetent, for example, maybe the US really doesn't have a plan for rapidly popping up new GPS satellites in the event the Chinese knock some down.

Inertial guidance can be quite accurate when you only have 30 minutes to build up errors. Land-based missiles know exactly where they're starting from. Submarine-based missiles not so much, but they are given targets which don't need as much accuracy.

> the US may have a way to put up a bunch more satellites quickly.

That would require a stockpile of both satellites and launchers.

I've never heard of a stockpile of GPS satellites, and they take years to build. But even assuming that there are a few at the ready, what will launch them? I'm hard-pressed to think of many orbital solid rockets, and those that do come to mind (such as Shavit) are way too harsh to launch an atomic clock, not to mention not having the payload capacity to MEO. The liquids are gentler, but are far from launch-ready and much more constrained for launch locations and orbital inclinations.

Meanwhile, we're building tactical nukes again, and signaling that we're willing to use them (and that somehow we can avoid further escalation): https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2018/07/24/tactical-nuc...

Cause Russian meddling.

> having less and less nuclear weapons

Disarmament didn't work out so well for Ukraine...

I'm skeptical it would have been a realistic deterrent in this case.

If Russia decides it's time to annex the entire country, on the other hand...

Seriously? Even a remote possibility of having Moscow flattened would have deterred an attack. Remember, it's the leaders who decide to nuke, there's no referendum of the people.

North Korea have tiny, impotent toy nukes and everyone around them are very careful.

The problem was it wasn't an "attack" in the classic "hey we're at war" sense. Russia is pretty good at fostering conflict on its borders without being blatant enough to make nuclear retaliation palatable.

The dynamics change when you have nukes to back your regular forces up.

The Ukraine could have thrown 100% of their conventional forces at the invasion, if they would have had a nuclear threat getting their backs.

As it stood, they could not mobilise because that would a) have left their flanks open because their conventional forces were in such a sad shape and b) going all in with conventional forces would have been an invitation to Russia to counter and crush them - think Russian tanks in Kiev. And it could be spun as a "legal war" and be over until the rest of the world knew how to react.

If on the other hand, you at all times have a bunch of ICBMs in your back pocket, Russian blitz krieg is not in the cards.

On the other hand, imagine what would happen if some of nuclear weapons were based near Donetsk and they would fall into hands of "separatists". Flattened Kyiv? Or imagine an accident (sabotage) with Ukrainian nuclear weapons.

Horrible things, of course.

I imagine exactly such concerns lead to the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine in the first place. After the end of the cold war, there was a frantic chase to secure nuclear warheads across the former Soviet Union. The US and Russia cooperated with this.

I am not saying it was a bad idea to relieve Ukraine of its nuclear arsenal. I am saying that a country that has them can keep a much higher profile in general.

But as for the "fall in to separatis hands" in a situation similar to this... very unlikely.

a) the central government would guard these systems more than anything

b) even if by some chance such weapons would fall into separatists hands, they would have to be very quick to launch - because the Russian allies would sweep in as fast as possible to stop them. And they would want to avoid having separatists control nuclear weapons as much as the central (Kiev) government would. Given the central government would have remaining nukes to respond with, the response would not go to Donetsk (maybe one to make a point), the response would go to Moscow.

And we are not even talking about what other European powers might do avoid a "broken arrow" situation. It's their backyard too.

>>North Korea have tiny, impotent toy nukes and everyone around them are very careful.

What North Korea has is irrelevant. The scary part they have is capability.

Given enough resources, its the equivalent of possessing seeds with highly fertile soil, and having the agricultural know-how.

To me the scary part is the regime's unpredictability combined with the proximity to Seoul. Even without nuclear weapons, someone waking up in a bad mood could result in hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Not with NATO all over the place.

Nuclear disarmament wasn't the only reason Russia was able to "annex" Crimea. A massive media blitz convinced many of the civilian population that they were being overrun by revolutionists, thugs, immigrants, etc and that only Russia could save them. I believe it's highly likely Russia would have succeeded even if Ukraine had all of their nuclear weapons in hand. Firing even one at Russia would have resulted in the rest of Ukraine being wiped off the map.

We really need to cut the stockpile to 300 deployed nukes and institute a no first use policy. That level of deterrence is enough to enough to make a nuclear attack madness but drastically reduce the likelihood of a civilization or species ending nuclear winter should they be used. This is, I think, an achievable goal though obviously larger reductions would be better.

The nuclear option actually limited the war. The Syrians were scared of going past the Jordan river, because of Israeli nuclear threats to Damascus.

"On the night of 8 October 1973, Israeli PM Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen 20 kiloton tactical nuclear weapons for Jericho missiles at Sdot Micha Airbase and McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II aircraft at Tel Nof Airbase." https://fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/farr.htm

Oh I heard about the US backing off Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Treaties. And it's probably because of Russian hackers.

You can't guarantee a decent existence, nuclear weapons or not. We certainly didn't have one before nuclear weapons existed. It seems to me the peace we have obtained in the last seventy years or so throughout a lot of the world is due to nuclear weapons, not despite them. It's almost certain the US and USSR would have fought a war if it weren't for their presence. Same with a lot of other countries. Seems to me like there is no going back anyway so we should be thankful for the relative peace that exists now likely due to their presence.

I completely agree that nuclear weapons are the major reason there hasn't been a world war since 1945. The world has been remarkably peaceful since then, and that's very much a good thing.

But what is the cost? We've traded frequent massive wars for an ongoing chance of complete catastrophe. What is that chance? If it's one in a million then maybe it's worth it. If it's one in a hundred per year, then we'll have purchased a few decades of peace at the cost of civilization.

Based on the various near misses over the decades, I suspect the actual probability is closer to the latter.

It does seem likely that there's no going back, but we should try really hard to make sure that the chance of catastrophe is as low as possible.

Yup. Hard to say what that chance is. You're probably right with your estimate. I simply don't worry about it much in the same way that I stopped worrying about crashing when riding with my friend on the autobahn going 240km/hr or more. One mistake in either situation and I won't even know there was a mistake. The end. Likewise I couldn't control either my friend or the world's desire and manufacturing of nukes. So I simply stopped thinking about it and accepted it. Life is dangerous. But I am glad that some people in power are working on the situation just like there are people who do put speed limits on the portion of the autobahn that needs them and police officers who, I assume, try to enforce them. There's simply a million other more important issues in my life which I can affect and change.

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