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Comment by newbamboo | Hacker News Reader

Why not talk about nuclear war? It’s one of several elephants in the room. The full collapse of a nuclear super power is unprecedented. Who gets the weapons?

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Well the USSR isn't around anymore and they had quite a few nukes so....

But the nukes are still around. Except Ukraine gave theirs up. It's not like they had a choice.

I think we got lucky with that one. A special set of circumstances that are unlikely to repeat.

We got lucky with that one so far.

Western thought severely undersells the noble and peaceful way the USSR folded up once they couldn't handle the economic madness any more.

Relative to what it could have been anyway, it was no doubt terrifying for a lot of people.

Which is interesting to note since a majority of the other weapons the former Soviet Union had made their way into several revolutions happening in the Middle East and Africa via several well known international arms dealers.

Not sure if it was just operationally unfeasible to move something like a ballistic nuclear weapon, but from what I can gather, it was one of the few things that wasn't sold off en masse after the collapse.

The Soviet Union (and America) made hundreds if not thousands of tactical nuclear weapons. These were very small; you could put many of them into a single standard shipping container.

During the 90s there were persistent rumors that some of these had been "lost", but as far as I know these rumors were never substantiated. If in fact these weapons didn't get stolen/sold, we probably have numerous intelligence agencies to thank.

USSR has fully collapsed, and the few years after its collapse were almost total anarchy.

My sentence was "I'm not just talking about things like nuclear war". Point being that, yes, the unique dangers of nuclear war seem so blatantly obvious that they're not likely to be ignored. Contrast that with one of the other "elephants in the room" that has the potential to be nearly as dangerous, but as these other risks don't involve, on the surface, metro-area obliterating fireballs, they are easier to downplay.

They still have them. Even more than pretty much anyone else.

They still have most of them.

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