Kyiv gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security assurances | Hacker News Reader

Kyiv gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security assurances

wsj.com

107 pointsbko55 comments

So Ukraine agreed to denuclearization in exchange for having it's borders recognized and protected by the US and Russia.

It is rather clear the an agreement written by the US is not worth the paper ot os written on.

Iran learned this about denuclearization. Ukraine learned it in 2014.

Unless the US Congress passes a treaty with 2/3 vote, yeah it's pretty much useless when a different party president enters the scene. Then again Russia has shown it will not abide by any agreements under the same dictator it has had for 20 years.

The internal workings of the US is not relevant to the signing of any of the treaties. It may affect if the US chooses to uphold it's obligations, but the Budapest memorandum[1] was certainly signed by the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

It’s hard to give meaningful security assurances when the powers involved have nuclear weapons. Ukraine is far more important to Russia than it is to the U.S. Clearly the U.S. is not willing to go to war with a nuclear power over Ukraine. Treaties are only as useful as the willingness of the signatories to abide by them and/or enforce them.

That's the point: nuclear weapons are a much better guarantee of safety than treaties and assurances. Compare what happened to Libya and Iraq to Iran and North Korea and it's clear that the only way to be secure in the modern age is to get nukes as fast as possible, and ignore any threats or offers to the contrary.

True, but we could have done a great deal more to help Ukraine. Keeping Europe energy independent from Russian for one thing, and better supplying the Ukrainians with arms for another.

This is sending a strong message that everyone must own nukes to control their own destiny.

The only way to be safe without nukes is to have some kind of "world police", but nobody wants that (especially naive populists).

And then the danger is from the world police.

It's rational to do so, even if there are pressing issues within.

And of course, the world's going to say any country wishing to do that is insane.

"Every great House of the Landsraad has a hidden cache of family atomics."

I've heard an opinion that this was illusion of choice - Ukraine would have had the nukes taken from them anyway - and this was just to save face.

More likely, the very maintenance cost would prove infeasible.

Ukrainian HDP is slightly larger than Slovakia's, and maintaining nukes for decades ain't easy. You need to control the complete supply chain for some very exotic spare parts.

You don't need to maintain _all_ the 1800 nukes; you can just maintain a credible deterrent. See, for example, Pakistan, which has > 100 nukes.

You could also sell a few of them every year to petromonarchy to finance the support.

As a Venezuelan, let's not do that.

32 or so would have been plenty

North Korea can afford not only maintanence, but also development of their own nukes.

>You need to control the complete supply chain for some very exotic spare parts.

...if you want 100% guarantees of their success, sure. But not everything has to be maintained to the US Air Force standards. At the very least, dirty bombs are successful too.

NK is also a totalitarian regime that does not ask for anyone's consent.

Ukrainian politicians would have to explain the cost of maintaining nukes to their population for the entire time since 1992 to 2022. There were plenty of times when peace seemed eternal.

My own country isn't willing to spend 2 per cent of its GDP for defense, even though it should.

Back when the USSR fell they barely could maintain their own stock.

I read somewhere that the US even gave them money to keep the nukes safe.

That’s pretty close to what Wikipedia says: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Ukraine

> The United States would also not have made Ukraine an exception when it came to the denuclearization of other post-Soviet states such as Belarus and Kazakhstan.[9] The deterrent value of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine was also questionable, as Ukraine would have had to spend 12 to 18 months to establish full operational control over the nuclear arsenal left by the Russians.[9] The ICBMs also had a range of 5,000–10,000 km (initially targeting the United States), which meant that they could only have been re-targeted to hit Russia's far east.[9] The air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) left by the Russians had been disabled by the Russians during the collapse of the Soviet Union, but even if they had been reconfigured and made to work by the Ukrainians, it is unlikely that they would have had a deterrent effect.[9] Had Ukraine decided to establish full operational control of the nuclear weapons, it would have faced sanctions by the West and perhaps even a withdrawal of diplomatic recognition by the United States and other NATO allies.[9] Ukraine would also likely have faced retaliatory action by Russia.[9] Ukraine would also have struggled with replacing the nuclear weapons once their service life expired, as Ukraine did not have a nuclear weapons program.

>The ICBMs also had a range of 5,000–10,000 km (initially targeting the United States), which meant that they could only have been re-targeted to hit Russia's far east.[9]

I never knew ICBMs had a minimum range as well as a maximum. Interesting.

Both Russia and Ukraine at that point needed humanitarian help to stave off famine.

Ukraine itself does not have the expertise to maintain the nukes, according to Sarotte's book. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300259933/not-one-inch

They could have hired on some Russians for 2-3x the pay, and maintain a much smaller number of nukes. Just enough to take out all the major cities in Russia would have been plenty.

Oh, that was a possibility if they were willing to spend money on that in the face of famine and unrest, given a lot of the expertise there find themselves out of a job.

I don't think their chances of surviving external pressures from both Russia and US would have been high.

North Korea is actually right - promises and agreements are worth their weight on paper.

Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220224101533/https://www.wsj.c...

also useful link:

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

The possibility of a nuclear skirmish between neighboring countries seems awful. A poor country with a fragile government should not be entrusted with nuclear weapons. Imagine what the terrorist organizations of the last 25 years would do with access to such weapons.

If Ukraine had kept its nukes it would have been destabilizing. It was a big concern at the fall of the Soviet union about all the "loose nukes" in the unstable, newly free former members. It was wisely deemed best to not have a bunch of new (unstable) nuclear states in the club.

We keep calling it a "democracy" to invoke sentiment and sympathy. The fact is that they're quite corrupt, and them having nukes would have been foolish for Europe and everyone.

Russia considers the Budapest Memorandum as broken far earlier - after the Euromaidan coup/revolution (depending on your point of view).

How convenient for Russia.

Yeah I believe their argument from day 1 has been that was fomented and partially financed by the US, and that their "meddling in 2016" was a response to that.

Putin considers any agreement as toilet paper when sized up beside his white supremacist ambitions.

Is there a list of countries that underwent some major form of disarnament? I know Libya also had chemical and nuclear program that they gave up, only to be overthrown by the West in 2011

From just a few examples in my head, disarnament doesn't work out compared to holding on to your capabilities. Can anyone more knowledge comment on the track record of disarnament?

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

I wonder if Russia would have invaded if Ukraine had nuclear weapons.

That's why it's called a nuclear deterrent

Or more formally, mutually-assured destruction.

Makes you wonder if every war with a nuclear power, will escalate to mutually assured destruction.

India and Pakistan have shown what that looks like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Ukraine

Pavlo Rizanenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament told USA Today that Ukraine may have to arm themselves with their own nuclear weapons if the United States and other world leaders do not hold up their end of the agreement. He said "We gave up nuclear weapons because of this agreement. Now, there's a strong sentiment in Ukraine that we made a big mistake." He also said that, "In the future, no matter how the situation is resolved in Crimea, we need a much stronger Ukraine. If you have nuclear weapons, people don't invade you."

I would be curious to know what is the nuclear latency of Ukraine, i.e. the technological distance from having a complete working device.

Ukraine operates 4 nuclear reactors and Soviet-era expertise on nuclear weapons is likely still present in the form of (retired) engineers and scientists, so they are likely able to develop it again.

This said, building a credible nuclear deterrence also requires at least one element of the nuclear triad, i.e. the capability to "deliver the gadget". In practical terms, more expertise to gain and more investments to do.

For delivery, I've always wondered if it was possible to smuggle them in, say, by car. No need for a rocket or anything. Then hide them in the target country in some underground facility or whatever in a big city. If Ukraine did that 10 years ago with Moscow, they could trigger them the second their border was violated.

This is probably laughably unpractical, I just don't know why. Radiation? Maintenance? Just the fact that you can only use them, not threaten with them?

This is interesting. Curious about this as well.

Rent a warehouse or storage unit and just keep the nukes there.

> you can only use them, not threaten with them

IMO this. The real reason of existence of nuclear weapons is deterrence, not actual retaliation. If you reach the point of nuclear retaliation, then you only get MAD (mutual assured destruction) and no one wins.

> For delivery, I've always wondered if it was possible to smuggle them in, say, by car. No need for a rocket or anything.

If you're interested on this possibility, a good movie I can recommend is "The Sum of All Fears" (2002).

Wouldn't the nuclear signature of something like that be trivially detectable though?

Probably, even for something as severe as an invasion, I highly doubt that Ukraine would have used Nukes against Russia. Considering how close together all the countries are in that region, unless they pointed it way inside Russia, the collateral damage would have been insane.

You think a single nuke would damage several countries?

A single nuke may lead to more nukes.

Of course, but them saying "unless they pointed it way inside Russia" has me thinking they think a single one would look like in a game of Civ

Ukraine, of all places, appreciates the staying power of radioactivity.

The fallout from air bursts really isn’t that bad. There were 65 above ground tests in Nevada before they went underground and then were stopped all together.

The destruction on site is of course horrific, but far afield the concerns are fairly minimal, unless you’re actively trying to cause fallout.

Nuclear weapons come in all shapes and sizes. Hell, there was a bazooka with nuclear warhead once. Such things can come handy when you need to, for example, destroy few dozens of Russian tanks at once, and since they are not ballistic missiles you do not risk starting Armageddon with them.

No way to know, of course, but the risks would have been much higher.

More information is required to answer that question, but I can imagine two countries that both have a policy of "no first use" could have a conventional war, including an invasion, without the conflict becoming nuclear. Losing a conventional war might be much better than "winning" a nuclear one.

I don't think so, I would rather be dead than face what is probably coming to the Ukrainian people under Russian (Putin's) oppression.

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