lessons from Ukraine... "don't give back your nukes"
The matter of Soviet nukes being stationed in Ukraine was so existential for Russia that a refusal to give up the nukes eventually would have led to a full-on invasion by Russia.
Ukraine had only been independent for a couple of years at that point, so they did not have the necessary military structures to defend themselves like they are doing this time around. The US would not have engaged in full-on war with Russia just to let Ukraine keep the nukes – at the time, nobody knew how Ukraine was going to develop, so the West preferred Ukraine giving up their nukes to avoid the scenario of a rogue post-Soviet country with nuclear weapons.
You have to remember, at the time, Ukraine was not yet seen in the West as this brave independent anti-Russia that it is perceived as today.
Finally, the Ukrainians could not have used those nuclear weapons in the hypothetical invasion. The nuclear command & control was headquartered in Russia, so the Ukrainians didn't have access to the launch codes. Even if they had somehow managed to circumvent that and actually used the nuclear weapons, that definitely would have united Russia and the West against Ukraine.
Now imagine a world where Russia didn’t have nukes, that we successfully got rid of those horrible weapons in the 1980s to 1990s (which was very possible if the American government would have been willing), how far do you think Russia would go then without being shielded by this threat? At the very least western nations wouldn’t have their favorite excuse for why they don’t send their so many weapons and so many armies to actually defend a nation under an invasion.
This is just wishful thinking. All countries agreeing to give up their nukes is about as likely as all countries agreeing never to go to war again because it's a net negative; not going to happen.
Not only do they have the power to destroy the world many times over, but they also have a deterrence power which empowers nuclear powers to engage in wars of aggression without fearing the consequences.
In other words, there are two lessons here. The one you took from this, is that nations can use nukes to deter invasion, and that denuclearizing puts them at greater risks of being invaded. You denuclearizing as a mistake. My lesson is that the real mistake was to allow Russia to keep their nukes, and to keep nuclear armed nations. South Africa denuclearized just fine and hasn’t been invaded. If the world had denuclearized at the same time, Ukraine’s denuclearization would have yielded the same success.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
If this was a bet, I wager the proliferation of democracies and decolonization is a much better explanation for why there are fewer wars, than the binary of whether nuclear weapons exist or not.
Remove the "Nukes" parameter, and all the other parameters get nullified, or could not even get realization the way it is happening in our nuke-ified world. We are talking a massive butterfly/domino effect.
WWIII would have happen without nukes, or we better start to believe the earth is flat.
Given the destructive nature of nukes, and the mathematical fact that unhindered proliferation will always lead to nuclear warfare, I think a safer world where we thank the things which has provably made our lives better in addition to preventing wars.
Aside from that, I’m curious. I understand that it can be hard for you to accept my theory that human rights and democracy have prevented wars (or rather you may believe that nukes brought us both), but how do you suppose decolonization is not a significant factor. Like in the decades after WW-2 when the world had nukes (including a couple of colonial powers), Europe saw some horrific wars in its colonies. Angola, Algeria, Vietnam, those were all colonial wars with so many unnecessary deaths and destruction. More often than not (mostly because of France) those involved a nuclear state as the aggressor. How does this actual history fit into your narrative?
What makes you so certain that full scale warfare is so unavoidable if not for nukes?
Secondly, the cold war is over. What I alluded to was that the world would get rid of nukes in the period after the election of Gorbachev, but before the election of Bush. At this point the cold war is pretty much over (if not completely over; and it is certainly over now). And in this post-cold war era, Russia—a nuclear power—invades Ukraine. Why not get rid of nukes now?
And finally, I believe the Earth can be whichever shape an author wants it to be in fiction. Alternative history is fiction, so in your alternative timeline of no nukes causing WW3, the earth may as well be a donut.
And we are witnessing probably the end of the internet public message board due to chatgpt AIs.