Of course I wish that we wouldn‘t need nuclear warheads capable of total annihilation to keep peace, but I‘m afraid that‘s just unrealistic.
https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2022/02/06/could-ukraine-...
https://www.icanw.org/did_ukraine_give_up_nuclear_weapons
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2015.1...
How difficult would it be to divert fuel and processed daughter nuclei to create a few weapons?
The answer comes in the form of another question: how many billions would it cost?
And ultimately building a nuclear weapon would alienate both sides unless it was being done explicitly with help.
Spent nuclear fuel rods are among the most dangerous and difficult to handle materials available, and ones that have been sitting in a power reactor for years are far more radioactive than ones that spend a day or two in a bomb production reactor. So reprocessing the fuel rods would be a considerable challenge and would require not insubstantial industrial facilities, which would likely be blindingly obvious to superpower intelligence agencies.
Then you'd have to fabricate the plutonium into a weapon. Weapons made from reactor-grade plutonium would be a real pain to handle and store because they would be exceedingly radioactive and would require a lot of shielding. But my understanding is that a nation-state with Ukraine's resources would probably be able to manage it if sufficiently determined. But, again, the idea that you'd be able to do it in secret is highly unlikely.
And then you'd have to deliver it. The resulting weapon would probably be extremely large, unlike the more sophisticated weapons that established nation-states have, and implausible to mount on a missile. So delivery would probably have to be with an aircraft, and then you've got the question of how likely it would be to get shot down before it reached its target.
And finally, you have to consider whether a few small nuclear weapons with not-great delivery systems would be a useful deterrent. It's not hard to imagine Russia's response if a few small nuclear weapons landed on its territory - and whatever else you might say about their military, they have a lot of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Ukraine would be a radioactive crater by the time Putin was finished with it.
And what's your proposal? Start nuclear war hoping that your guess is correct?
I think the verdict is still out on this. Should we destroy human civilization with nuclear weapons at some point in the future, none of that peace will have been worth it. We've had so many close calls (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls) that we're very lucky that this hasn't happened yet.
It really does seem like just plain dumb luck that we made it through those turbulent wild west days when the bomb was new without killing ourselves.
Just as a side note, reading all the unexpected failure modes that popped up during the weapons program was remarkably humbling. Interactions with reality will poke all the holes in can in your world view. One of my favorite examples from the book: One of the early designs of the bomb required a human to specifically remove a key card from the bomb in order to arm it. This was deemed pretty safe. Until, an aircraft entered problems during a training mission and entered a spin. The centrifugal force of that spin was enough to suck the key out, arming the bomb on the way down as the plane crashed into the earth.
There is, counter intuitively, a lot of comfort to be had in modern missiles from a "will we accidentally blow ourselves up?" perspective.
If the odds of nuclear war are 1% in a century, we won’t last much more than 10,000 years, and might last a lot fewer.
If you look at the close calls Wikipedia page linked upthread, one of the worst was a Soviet sub that lost radio contact during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2 out of 3 (!) of the officers on the sub approved a nuclear strike on the US fleet. The fate of human civilization relied on the choice of a single mid-level naval officer.
Considering the other two officers approved the strike, the final officer being the kind of person who would also approve the strike was probably in the 50/50 realm at best. So basically we won a coinflip on that day for the fate of humanity, and that's far from the only close call we've had.
But now we see Russia invading Ukraine and using the threat of nuclear weapons to reduce NATO countermeasures. The nuclear weapons have made its conventional war possible.
It was Russia removing their control of Nukes under their control in Ukraine.
Somewhat a big difference.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...
Its disappointing considering Europe's history and seasoned institutions.
I would not be surprised if Ursula has to phone Washington everytime she needs to go to the toilet.