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Comment by nuccy | Hacker News Reader

Thus two messages for every other country:

1. Make nukes, never give up on those regardless of what assurances of safety you get

2. If you are bigger and stronger - you are right, do whatever you want, international laws and rules do not matter any more

Lets see where all this will bring the world to in the next 10 years or a generation.

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Also Europe will have to increase its nuclear arsenal since it is clear that Europe can't no longer rely on US. Europe was too trusting for too long.

They could ally with China. The Chinese are only frenemies with Russia anyways, and they make way much more money trading with the rest of Europe.

Perhaps surprisingly, Europe has more nuclear weapons than China (France: 290 warheads, UK: 225 warheads, China: 500 warheads). China never really bought into the mutually assured destruction doctrine in the same way that the US and Soviet Union did.

Their stockpile is estimated to grow to 1500 by 2035.

https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...

I don’t think the Chinese have been sitting still for the last 10 years, and I doubt they will sit still for the next 10 years.

I mean, see Doctor Strangelove. If you have a doomsday weapon, that’s only helpful if you _tell_ people about it! If China had built loads of warheads, they’d hardly keep that secret, as most of these point of having loads of warheads is for everyone else to know you had them.

Realistically, by the time China and France got on the nuclear scene, doctrine had shifted from “nuclear torpedos, nuclear guns, nuclear landmines, nuclear everything” to “you have some submarines with missiles; you can have other stuff if you want, but no-one cares about it”. There’s little point in having thousands of warheads, these days.

(The UK did briefly go down the ‘nuclear everything’ road, but pulled back for cost/sanity reasons)

I meant that your data is out of date, and China has moved quickly in the last ten years. They went in the last ten years from being able to just hit the west coast to hitting all the way up to the Midwest, do you think they won’t have some amount of increased coverage in the next, especially with their space program accelerating their ICBM program?

The truth is that China hit MAD awhile ago and doesn’t really need to play up or even build much more on its nuclear arsenal. They are better off investing in conventional warfare for the near term, and especially in new arms like drones that give them an actual advantage in future conflicts.

China invested heavily into hypersonic delivery vehicles instead of scale. They didn't want nuclear winter, they want to make sure that ANY attempt by the US to project power in "Their" waters evaporates in a plasma ball. They don't seem interested in nuking the US mainland.

Instead, their focus has been on building invasion barges so that they can take Taiwan. So that's exciting. Hope none of you like computer chips!

They were able to nuke the west coast in the 90s. I don't think they have been sitting still with their ICBMs, the same ones that get your taikounauts into the space are the ones you use to deliver nukes.

Regardless, they only need enough to make nuclear war with them MAD, which I think they've had for a decade or so.

Also China has a no first use policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use

I thinks Europe's trust in the US was fairly reasonable. It's the US and its governance that has gone to shit.

> Lets see where all this will bring the world to in the next 10 years or a generation.

We've seen this movie before. It doesn't go well.

With respect to how Ukraine yielded up nukes while Russia gave "assurances" that they would respect Ukrainian borders [0], Putin has claimed it doesn't count now because it's a different Ukraine.

If that's really how he feels, then it's time to expel the imposter "Russia" that's been falsely posing as a member of the United Nations Security Council, because it's not reeealy the USSR...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

Well, in the 90s Clinton negotiated the Agreed framework with North Korea not to get nukes in exchange for lowering sanctions. Then Bush admin called it "appeasement" and let it die. Then NK got nukes.

Obama's admin negotiated the JCPOA deal with Iran, same thing. They put the most inspectors ever in any country to make sure Iran doesn't get nukes. Trump's admin then unilaterally ended it.

Tom Cotton and Republicans openly warned Iran during Obama's admin that the US is fickle and will change its policy as soon as administrations change. This has been going on ever since treaties with the Native Americans ("white man speaks with forked tongue") but the Cotton letter was refreshingly honest:

https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-and...

The messages for every country to get nukes have been loud and clear, but no country has done it in the southern hemisphere, for instance. Even though USA had been involved in regime change or invasions of almost all of them in the last 80 years: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/09/13/us-251-military-i...

> no country has done it in the southern hemisphere, for instance

South Africa

Well, they dismantled them all. So it’s back to 0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...

Yes but that's not what you asserted. In addition to South Africa, Balarus and Kazakhstan gave up their programs at the same time as Ukraine, for the same reasons.

> If you are bigger and stronger - you are right, do whatever you want, international laws and rules do not matter any more

In reality, that was always the case.

"International laws" are also a weird thing. There is no international parliament, international police and international court. I think the only viable agreements are of a kind "if you don't do A then we don't do B".

>In reality, that was always the case.

*while everybody made sure that they would band together to punish such behavior as the even bigger and stronger combined force

Yes. If Ukraine kept the soviet nukes, they wouldn't be in this position.

Non-proliferation - and relying on the benevolence of a few mercurial and spiteful superpowers - is, in hindsight, a horrible miscalculation.

There will be a world war within the next 3 years, not 10.

There already is. It’s just done through non-conventional means, hybrid warfare and proxies, since all superpowers have nukes now.

Also the cyberspace, where Trump just recently surrendered to Moscow as well.

This has been true since 1945

Did the rules matter when hundreds of thousands of iraqi s were killed on lies?

> If you are bigger and stronger - you are right, do whatever you want, international laws and rules do not matter any more

Rules never mattered in history. it's always up to strongest to impose their version of "fairness".

It's not always the biggest and strongest. Sometimes it's the many.

Rules matter as long as they are enforced. It's only when enforcement is asymmetrical that problems begin.

As a matter of fact, strongest has the capacity to enforce rules. My statement still stands

And the strongest used to have a better version of fairness for so long countries got complacent and didn't realize how quickly it could flip on them

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