Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

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Corruption in the army is one thing. Another one is over-relying on the nuclear weapons. They probably thought "Who cares if that tank's engine is stolen. After all, we have nukes!".

Also, I would argue about legacy. The legacy, as with many things Russian, was mostly made up. The Soviet army did a lot of atrocities during, e.g. looting and rapings in WW2 in Germany (aka the "German spring"), the pointless Afghan war that killed 1mln civilians, the suppression of democracy in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the 1960s, the Chechen wars, etc. It has never been as glorious as Soviet propaganda described it. It's always been ugly and brutal.

PS. I highly recommend reading the long threads of Kamil Galeev [1] on Twitter. He did an excellent job explaining why Russia and its army are what they are.

[1] https://twitter.com/kamilkazani

> "Who cares if that tank's engine is stolen. After all, we have nukes!"

But what are the odds those nukes even work? From what I understand, they're complex devices that require expert maintenance. What are the odds they've been properly maintained over the disastrous past 3 decades?

It's not something I'd ever want to bet on, because even if only 10% of their nukes work, that's still plenty to do tons of damage with, but considering the sorry state of their military, I'd be quite surprised if all of their nukes still worked perfectly.

That's a good question. It would be irresponsible to bet on the nukes not working. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if one day it becomes known that Russia's nukes are non-functional due to negligence and corruption.

Historically, Russian nukes tended to fail by disabling fail safes and self-arming. It took joint efforts with the US in the 90s to find(!) and disable the faulty ones.

I'm surprised none have gone off, frankly.

Imagine learning years later that Russia has, by this time, already launched several nuclear weapons at kyiv.

>But what are the odds those nukes even work?

I've been thinking about this possibility for a while:

* Putin fires tactical atomic weapon at some empty plot of Ukrainian land, and announces it as a "demonstration" of Russian might.

* The weapon is a dud.

I'm not sure whether this outcome might not be worse in the long run, in terms of geopolitical stability, than if the weapon performs as expected!

Why announce in advance? Drop the bomb, if it’s a dud, don’t mention it at all.

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