Hacker News Reader

Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear war. It has fallen out of favor to talk about this as a serious possibility, but the world is in many ways closer to nuclear armageddon right now than it has been at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.

View on HN

Tom Nichols wrote about this recently in The Atlantic. [0] It's not just the general public, but also the next generation of military and national security leadership that has grown comfortable ignoring nuclear weapons and takes deterrence for granted.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/us-nucl...

This was the answer, pre-Ukraine already. That war doesn't move the needle that much, as NATO/Russia escalation is far from the only nuclear war threat -- there's also mistakes by any party, India/Pakistan, North Korea, China, etc.

The China/Pakistan border clashes have resulted in fatalities on the order of several dozen in something where neither nation really wants to escalate. Ukraine would have long since lost this war if not for the US directing the funneling tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons, training, and so on to Ukraine. This support has been directly responsible for the excess deaths of Russians and Ukrainians alike numbering in the tens of thousands.

Not only is this orders of magnitude more impactful than the other conflicts, but perhaps even more concerning is what in the world the endgame might be? By effectively throwing its entire influence into this war, the US has now effectively staked that influence on the outcome of the war. And it's the exact same situation for Russia. The two most nuclear armed nations are now in a conflict that is a must-win for both of them.

IMO this conflict ending up going nuclear is still highly improbable, but highly improbable is far closer to nuclear war than we've ever been.

> This support has been directly responsible for the excess deaths of Russians and Ukrainians alike numbering in the tens of thousands.

No. It's Russian invasion on Ukraine directly responsible for the deaths.

The Ukraine war is small stakes compared to what the U.S. and USSR did during the Cold War. The U.S. accepted stalemate in Korea and defeat in Vietnam rather than go nuclear. They will not do it over Ukraine. It is not “must-win” for the U.S.

Supporting Ukraine is not even significantly risking U.S. influence or standing in the EU. Getting Finland and Sweden into NATO is a benefit to the U.S. that will endure even if Ukraine completely falls (which it won’t).

I guess there is a chance that Russia could initiate a nuclear exchange if Putin is 100% suicidally insane. I don’t believe that he is.

I think you are underestimating a few facts in the conflict of Ukraine which downplays it's significance.

The EU and the US have drawn the lines very explicitly, which before they were able to whist away any pressing questions on relations by claiming 'allies'.

Russia has been cut off from the IMF dominated financial system. No FX, No Swift, no IMF support. This is the financial equivilent of going nuclear. This has led Russia and China to announce they are goiing to directly compete with the IMF and start their own federal reserve.

My point is not that nuclear war is imminent, but quite the opposite. We have new tools to declare total war without a single bullet being fired. Cyber, destabilization and financial war might prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be.

Russia hasn't used IMF support in decades. Not all Russian banks are banned from SWIFT.

> Cyber, destabilization and financial war might prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be.

Nuclear could plausibly result in the extinction of our species. Suggesting that financial warfare could "prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be" seems patently false.

> far closer to nuclear war than we've ever been.

This is the statement that is being disagreed with.

Surprised I had to scroll down so far to find a reasonable comment.

It is in human nature to exceptionalize the time period you happen to be living in. It is worth guarding against these cognitive biases.

so your logic is when a powerful nation invades another weaker nobody should intervene because there will be lost lives. I am writing the comment in hope that at least nobody gets convinced about your well worded and deadly wrong argument.

Ironically this could all be happening because a lack of nukes. Ukraine gave theirs away and have been left essentially naked and defenceless since. Would Putin have thought twice if they had a nuclear arsenal? Who knows.

Ukraine didn't have the codes to use them.

I mean Ukrainians aren't idiots, I'm sure they could've either cracked any necessary codes or worked around their need in the ~31 years since 1991 (Ukraine's independence).

I suspect it would be easiest to just take the nuclear material out of the unusable missiles and construct a different weapon using it. Russia is adjacent to them so any sort of nuclear weapon launch-able from an artillery or plane still sounds useful.

It would have been an act of war. Ukraine would have had to fight the Russian army protecting the nukes in Ukraine.

Despite the breakup of the USSR, I don't think Russia would have let that happen.

For comparison, How do you think that the USA would react if Turkey tried to size control of US nukes housed there?

Not the same situation. Soviet nukes were soviet, with good chunks of them buit in Ukraine.

See for instance where that was built: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)

Also, Chernobyl.

I think you are missing my point. The Nukes were built by the soviets, but after the breakup, Russia had control of them in Ukraine. In order for Ukraine to take full possession, they would have to fight through Russians at military bases.

I agree with that, my point is that the Ukrainians had the technical capabilities to seize control. And they chose not exercise that option. Besides, why did only Russia, of the 15 post-Soviet states have to retain control over all the stockpile?

The answer is probably because the alternative was too scary for the west. Better to keep dealing just with Moscow.

> It would have been an act of war.

No it wouldn't.

They were pressured by the US to give up Soviet nukes. Codes are easy to fix, but nukes need service and are expensive to keep so it was as much of sparing measure than anything.

I think you are missing my point. The Nukes were built by the soviets, but after the breakup, Russia had control of them in Ukraine. In order for Ukraine to take full possession of the nukes in their country, they would have to fight through Russians at military bases.

USSR had one army though, but after that it was controlled by Commonwealth of Independent States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_de...

If Ukrainians wanted they could have prevented this at the time of Soviet Union dissolution, but they didn't so there's not much to discuss.

We might be saying the same thing.

My point is basically that if Ukraine tried to take full control of the Nukes in their country, they would have been picking a fight with Russia, and possibly the US as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/03/14/u...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep10926.13?seq=2#metadata_i...

A nation-state reverse engineering the codes/ignition module is easier than collecting everything from scratch.

But the general thought is that NATO would have had to protect them (I don't buy it, but that's the theory).

Why would NATO protect Ukraine?

Nato isn't a signatory of the Budapest Memo [1].

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

If Ukraine had nukes and NATO didn't want them to use them or risk losing them, they may have acted.

Again, I think it's unlikely and the "Russia wouldn't have invited Ukraine if they had kept their nukes" doesn't actually fly (and probably would just have been another reason for Russia to invade: 'they're right there and they have nukes!'

As long as they could have taken the warheads apart, they could have built new weapons out of them. Or for that matter, just starting from already enriched fissile material would be plenty.

...and Russia would just have sat there and accepted it? We'd be on the cusp of a much bigger and earlier war.

For that reason, the international community wouldn't have accepted it either, because it would open the door for everyone else to start developing them. Kazakhstan had nukes and voluntarily disarmed for this reason.

....and the USA would have just sat there and accepted that?

The US did not want another nuclear power and was very interested in making sure Ukraine never became one

They didn’t give them away, they were convinced by Russia and the US to do so.

I know, yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com