Comment by Terry_Roll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terry_Roll | Hacker News Reader

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There was a ban, but the US got around it by claiming they were upgrading existing one's or something like that. The key point being the agreement didnt mention anything about "upgrades" which is akin to building new nukes. Not the first time the US has done this when considering how Nato only provided a verbal agreement they wouldnt expand towards Russia and here we are now. Oh and lets not forget Crimea region (assuming sea area) is reportedly supposed to have the 4 largest oil deposits which always comes in handy when the Saudi's are running out hence the massive diversification drive seen in the middle east.

I did notice someone felt uneasy about anthrax spores contaminating soil so decided to have a bit of a bonfire on Anthrax Island in the UK! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-608...

It wouldnt have taken much to find some spores, wild bird nesting sites will turn soil over and could still offer up some spores post bonfire, but it doesnt take much to bring on your own dormant biological weapon anthrax spores in todays world with easy access to knowledge across borders. Cows & Sheep are natural carriers, sheep more so due to their high copper content which is needed to make wool, which is why they used sheep in the original Anthrax Island experiment, but its basic biology growing your own bacteria now a days!

Militaries around the world when they did these sorts of experiments decades ago, never thought communication would improve to todays standards ie the internet which means alot of things they thought they could keep secret is no longer the case! One of their tactics with sensitive stuff is to use older people because they die off more quickly and the secrets die with them, plus old people dont get to spend time with the younger generation that could be an easy way to pass on secrets.

Moral of the story, talk to the older generation which might have worked in the military doing secret stuff to find out what they know. However even your grandparents who might have been in that situation, wont tell you everything they did, because it might protect you, so talk to random older people to find out stuff, less obvious connection then.

> There was a ban, but the US got around it by claiming they were upgrading existing one's or something like that. The key point being the agreement didnt mention anything about "upgrades" which is akin to building new nukes. Given that we are talking about Uranium, and all the US stockpile uses Plutonium, I don't see how they would have used that for nukes. As suggested by others, more probably they blended that with depleted Uranium and used as cheap fuel for reactors

> “and here we are now”

No of course, that’s a completely logical story arc. Good thing it makes so much sense otherwise I’d be skeptical you were leaving some information out.

You think a one sentence summary of events may not have provided all the nuance of the situation? Preposterous.

Don’t get confused by Kremlin propaganda.

It’s Putins neighbours that desperately want to get into NATO so he doesn’t invade and slaughter them like he’s doing with Ukraine now. He has a history of his behaviour.

It’s Putins neighbours that desperately want to get into NATO so he doesn’t invade and slaughter them like he’s doing with Ukraine now. He has a history of his behaviour.

And it was the Cuban government that wanted Soviet missiles on Cuba as a deterrent against another Bay of Pigs Invasion.

I was thinking recently about how both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Russian invasion of Ukraine had wildly insufficient hard power put into them by the aggressors, in part because of groupthink causing the leadership to wildly underestimate their opponents and overestimate the local support for the exiles who formed part of the invasion force.

(I also wonder how much of what I think happened in the Cold War is what actually happened, and how much is just the stories my side likes to tell itself. One of the fun things I found when learning German is that it has the same word for both “history” and “story”: “Geschichte”).

I am German and I don't think I have ever really noticed this. Even though they are the same words letter by letter, they are still two completely separate words conceptually, i.e. Geschichte is not understood to generally mean story and sometimes in in a certain context to more specifically mean a story about the past, i.e. history. The origin however may be exactly this, but I don't know that.

And that also does not justify an annexation of Cuba by the US, so we agree I believe that this Russian invasion is completely unjustified.

My point is that US security interests outweighed Cuba's sovereignty and security interests in face of a real threat. But when people talk about a NATO membership of Ukraine or other neighbors of Russia, then their sovereignty is often portrait as absolute and whatever Russia thinks can not possibly be relevant.

Or take Stuxnet and the damage it caused, that is really just a more sophisticated way of dropping a bomb onto those enrichment facilities. What does that say about Iranian sovereignty? The Russian invasion is certainly unjustified and will probably end up achieving the exact opposite if NATO expansion was a major concern for Russia - I am neither saying it was, but I tend to think so, nor that it was the sole reason.

But in a hypothetical future were Ukraine became a NATO member and NATO placed or planned to place certain assets in Ukraine while there was no good faith attempt to consider Russian concerns - and I am again not saying that there were no attempts or that Russia was not responsible that such attempts did not yield a solution - there might be a justification to at least target military assets if we apply standards consistently.

> My point is that US security interests outweighed Cuba's sovereignty and security interests in face of a real threat

You're having trouble reconciling this because because you're not viewing the USA as "the bad guy" when it comes to Cuba. There are similarities in the two situations - large country repeatedly interfering in newly independent smaller neighbour (who they insist belongs within their sphere of influence), who in turn reaches out internationally for allies to help with defence. But to acknowledge this similarity you need to willing to recognise that the USA was the aggressor in Cuba, just as Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine.

I think you understood my comment as almost the opposite of what I wanted to say. My point is that if US security concerns were a valid reason to oppose Soviet missiles in Cuba, then by the same standard Russian security concerns are - or at least can be - a valid reason to oppose an Ukrainian NATO membership or at least an unrestricted placement of NATO assets in Ukraine.

Or the other way around, you can not easily argue that the USA can decide whether or not Cuba can have missiles and at the same time argue that Russia has absolutely no say in what kind of NATO assets end up in Ukraine. And to be even more specific, I am not arguing that both can not be true at the same time, they are not identical situations and all the small differences might add up and make a difference.

But this is something one has to make a case for, Ukraine is a sovereign state and decides for itself whether or not it joins NATO doesn't cut it, at least in my opinion. Or pick the other side and argue that Cuba should have been allowed to host missiles and the USA was wrong preventing this, which probably will imply that Russia or China should be allowed to place missiles in Cuba today.

I think it's also worth remembering it was not just the Bay of Pigs, the CIA also had also been conducting "Operation Mongoose" where it performed terrorist attacks and dropped bombs on Cuba and various other activities. This stopped a little after the crisis, so it seems to have been effective in that respect.

It may be a Kremlin talking point, but that doesn't make it baseless. It's a pretty well-known (and I should actually think uncontroversial) fact that Washington and its allies have been bolstering Ukrainian military capabilities in various ways for several years now. How else do you think Europe's poorest country has been able to withstand an invasion from Europe's strongest army so well?

And a good thing they did. Without it, Russia might have easily conquered Ukraine.

Every argument against NATO, US or EU supporting eastern European countries is easily disproven by the current situation in Ukraine. Russia under Putin clearly is an expansionist aggressor.

The idea that NATO would actually invade Russia seems pretty baseless. They aren’t even prepared to defend Ukraine directly.

With Ukraine under the hood, it wouldn't have been that difficult. I know that NATO is a defensive alliance but it can go an offensive if members agree. Not saying that this is a valid argument for Russia invading Ukraine.

> With Ukraine under the hood, it wouldn't have been that difficult.

Yes, it would have.

Ukraine joining NATO doesn't neutralize Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

> I know that NATO is a defensive alliance but it can go an offensive if members agree.

Sure, and it has, twice; it's also participated in an reactive invasion based on its defensive mission.

NATO’s official defensive purpose isn’t why a NATO design on invading Russia is implausible, but it remains implausible.

> Europe's strongest army

The conflict has been horrific and bloody and I do not want to make light of this. But I think what we have seen over the last month or so should dispel any notion that Russia had anything close to the strongest military of the European countries.

If you take into account their nuclear capability they obviously do.

Ukraine thankfully haven’t had to defend themselves against Russian nuclear weapons though. But if you go down that road, it would’ve made no difference whether the EU gave them absolutely nothing, or even twice the amount of military aid they have already given. Use of nuclear weapons would have been catastrophic against Ukraine circa 2014 (poorly equipped), Ukraine circa 2022 (well equipped) and basically any non-nuclear country whether they're rich or poor.

It would have been even more catastrophic against a nuclear-capable country.

I guess we should be glad that the military aid was in the forms of anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems and such then

It's not immediately obvious to me that Russian nukes are still in perfect working order. From what I understand, they require quite a bit of maintenance, and even the US had to relearn how to maintain their nuclear weapons at some point.

It's not a chance I would want to take, but I think it's entirely possible that much of the Russian nuclear stockpile might not work anymore.

I wouldn't want to risk it but you're right that it's possible they weren't maintained properly from the fall of the USSR to today. I don't know exactly how fragile or picky the hardware is, but my guess would be that it takes a lot of care and effort (and therefore money) to do, in a country which probably had other priorities for much of the last 3 decades.

It doesn't even matter. Even if 10% works it's enough...

It is baseless.

The West isn't thrusting these weapons into the unwilling hands of Ukranians.

Ukrainians want these weapons to defend themselves against the expansionist Putin regime.

Ukranians (the regular people) have in the past 10 years overthrown a Kremlin puppet government, elected a pro-Nato, pro-EU government and have now joined their armed forces to literally fight the Russian army off its lands.

It is the regular people of the old Soviet block that want to join Nato.

> How else do you think Europe's poorest country has been able to withstand an invasion from Europe's strongest army so well?

Russia is not the strongest army of Europe. And it never has been for the last decades, as the war currently shows:

- Most of the command chain, not just in the military but especially in the intelligence services has been replaced by yes-men too afraid to report the actual truth to their superiors. Had Putin had decent intel, I highly doubt he'd have gone through with invading Ukraine in the first place, or at the very least with a different tactic. Russian leaders clearly thought they would be welcomed by Ukrainians as liberators, so the Russians didn't start off with embedding special-ops teams weeks if not months before to liquidate the Ukrainian leadership or to destroy critical defensive infrastructure.

- ETA: Russia additionally lost a huge amount of intel in the last years after the Western countries yeeted a lot of their embassy staff for being spies as a consequence of the various sometimes extremely dangerous murders and murder attempts (Litvinenko, Skripal, Navalny, Gluschkow and a lot of others).

- Their equipment is aged - just look at the various OSINT Twitter accounts, most of what is destroyed or taken over by the Ukrainian Tractor Army is old Soviet-era shit. The sightings of any modern heavy tanks or other weaponry are very very low.

- Their equipment is extremely shoddily maintained. The stuff hasn't been moved around for years, parts were taken to repair other equipment and replacement parts been replaced by inferior quality parts (e.g. tires). The result is that stuff breaks down left and right.

- The soldiers sometimes aren't even soldiers. A big part of why the invasion went so sideways so quickly was that the second and third waves were not soldiers - they were OMON or SOBR units, glorified riot cops. Or conscripts being forced to fight in Ukraine. Or ordinary people being press-ganged [1].

- The soldiers are paid shit. No matter where you gather reports from - from Russia over Belarus to Ukraine, there is a common pattern of soldiers selling fuel, weapons, ammo and spare parts for vodka and food, of lootings, of rape.

- The soldiers are completely untrained or severely undertrained. There are videos circulating that show just how much difficulty the soldiers have in driving a tank - obviously they are going to run into difficulties, and they did so when they had to go off the street and into the treacherous half-frozen, half muddy ground. Not to mention the discipline issues from above.

- The soldiers are badly equipped. Partially because vital equipment like encrypted radios or navigation systems have never been bought (because the order got reduced somewhere along the chain and someone bought a nice new car instead), partially because it has been stolen and "privatized", partially because no one gave a damn (many years expired MREs). All together, that makes for pretty low morale and fighting efficiency. And a good laugh if every highway sign points to The Hague!

- There is a massive lack of infantry as it is in every other army of the world. Sending in a column of tanks undefended is a clear suicide mission, and yet Russia didn't have another choice - the result was that Ukrainians, sometimes equipped with literal WW2 panzerfausts or over 100 years old machine guns [1] had it as easy as shooting on clay practice targets... the tanks couldn't fight back, they couldn't move, they were prime targets. Add to that that the equipment is in a bad condition which means in addition to tanks shot down by the Ukrainian Army, the tank columns were constantly stopped by one of their tanks breaking down, meaning that the following tanks were even easier for the Ukrainian Army to blast to pieces.

- Only God knows what's up with Russian anti-aircraft defense. Really. There is no explanation why the Russian Army fails to defend itself against the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones... a fact that Ukrainian soldiers quickly turned into a war song.

- The Russian Army seems to have been a lot more posturing and grand-standing than actual fighting experience. There were regular bloodbaths caused by them over the last decades, yes, but if you look at where the Russians and their goons fought it's no surprise: some backwater piss poor countries with hardly any men and weapons to fight against. Now that they are fighting in Ukraine, which propped up its army and its militia (such as the infamous Azov batallion) since 2014, the Russian Army sees a real conflict for the first time.

And finally, Ukrainians have something worth fighting for, and every war crime the Russians commit only incentivizes them more: their lives and freedom. Nothing what Russia does can even closely match that. The Ukrainians will be fighting until their last breath with every bit of power they have - and their leadership is symbolizing that every single day.

[1] https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/some-really-old-weapons-...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-officials-in-russi...

> literal WW2 panzerfausts

That Panzerfaust 3 they're using is not a WW2 weapon, but a very distant modern successor. Unlike the original Panzerfaust, it had a double (tandem) shaped warhead that enables it to punch through reactive armor that would stop a regular shaped warhead.

Military help sent from West to Ukraine is at about 1/30 of military equipment sold by Germany and France to RF.

Ukraine (literary "Area of Defense") has better morality and better men because of huigh numbers of wars fought in last thousand+ years.

“Here we are now”. Oh please, not this rubbish. No one forced Putin to invade and commit war crimes in a so-called “brotherly” neighbour.

No one forced Putin to invade and commit war crimes in a so-called “brotherly” neighbour.

Sure, but. The USA did not tolerate Soviet missiles on Cuba and I am not sure this has changed - would the USA tolerate Russian or Chinese missiles at its border today? Therefore just saying that the Ukraine or any other Russian neighbor are sovereign states and can do whatever they want is at least somewhat of a double standard.

And just to be clear, I am not justifying the invasion, I am not saying that there was no attempt to find a compromise, I am not saying that Russia is not responsible that no compromise was reached, I am just saying that states constantly have interests in what other states are doing or not doing, and saying Ukraine or any other state is sovereign and can do whatever they want without consequences is naive a point of view and at best yields the correct conclusions by accident.

With that said, I still hope that the Ukraine will defeat the Russians as quickly as possible, with as little casualties as possible on both sides, and regain control of the entire territory as it was until 2014.

There is no need whatsoever that Ukraine, having joined NATO, to then have NATO bases, nuclear weapons or even any strategic weapons on its territory. This could be made a legal requirement by the joining treaty.

That this is threat to Russia is a Russian propaganda talking point.

Also, it's only Russia's fault it has no friends.

There is no need whatsoever that Ukraine, having joined NATO, to then have NATO bases, nuclear weapons or even any strategic weapons on its territory. This could be made a legal requirement by the joining treaty.

I completely agree, after all that is the situation with Norway. And as I said, I am not claiming that there were no such attempts nor am I blaming one side or the other that this didn't lead to a solution. I am just opposing this notion that sovereignty is all that counts and therefore Russia's opinion can not possibly matter.

That this is threat to Russia is a Russian propaganda talking point.

This I just can not understand. If you have a thousand tanks a thousand kilometres away from my border, then you are a smaller threat than if you have your thousand tanks right at my border, even if the only difference is that it takes you some time to drive to my border which gives me some time to prepare for your attack. We can argue all day long how big a difference it makes, but I can not see how you can argue that bringing NATO assets closer to the Russian border threatens Russia less than having the further away.

> This I just can not understand.

Russian propaganda works hard to make people equate "Ukraine in Nato = NATO tanks on RU border, NATO nuclear weapons in Ukraine" which we've both agreed is false.

I agree that NATO weapons on the RU border are a threat to Russia, but then they're already in the Baltic countries, so how would Ukraine be different ?

All this points to a good old "might makes right" spheres of influence competition.

Russia already shares multiple borders with NATO and that border is likely going to get much bigger when Finland joins. All due to the war in Ukraine.

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