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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>- Ukraine exchanged nukes for beautiful promises.

Why do people keep parroting this false trope?

They had no other choice but to hand over their nukes since the nukes were never theirs to begin with, they belonged to Russia, and they had no launch codes for them anyway, which were in Moscow, nor the resources to maintain them.

And that's not exactly what the world needed at the time: unkempt nukes in the hands of a bankrupt and corrupt nation going through political and economic turmoil of the 90s USSR collapse, guaranteeing them to get "lost" and end up in the hands of despots and warlords.

So giving them up was the correct and only choice for them. Otherwise they would have been persuaded by force to give them up either through sanctions or even through military intervention.

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> Why do people keep parroting this false trope?

Because it looks consistent, it's incredibly close to actual facts and it serves the narrative well.

But yeah, it is false.

First of all, broadly speaking, Budapest memorandum was not broken at a scale people think it was. The memorandum is quite short, go read it and decide for yourself whether it was failed. Bear in mind that the memorandum has no legal consequences, it's not binding at all.

Second, what you have said about the nukes is mostly correct. I have been living in Ukraine since before the independence and up until the war and let me tell you: people in the West have no idea how poor Ukraine was at the time. A wasteland. There was no funds to fuel ambulances in Kiev, let alone maintain the extremely expensive nukes. Nukes have an expiration date, and they would be rendered useless by the time Ukraine scrambled funds to maintain even a single one of them. Leave alone the fact that there was no (extremely expensive and complex) service facilities, no fissile material to maintain the nukes and no ways to procure or produce one.

Third, people in the west have no idea how corrupt Ukraine was (and I hate to say it - is). There is no doubt at all that some of the nukes would be lost.

So, there is no conceivable scenario in which Ukraine gets to keep and maintain those nukes in the nineties.

(I hate to say all of it as I am ukrainian.)

no, you are not. and if Pakistan and north korea csn do it, so can Ukraine . post your lying fanfiction elsewhere moscovite.

PS: Kasachstan bought some 3 months ago and how the music has shifted. Enjoy your frozzen jail, with nuclear armed neighbors as guard.

Ukraine in the early 90s hardly saw Russia as an adversary. After are all they invaded Moldova together.

Also back in the early 90s spending massive amounts of money you can't afford when your country is in an extremely horrible spot economically just in case you might need it 20 years later doesn't seem politically feasible (i.e. you need to be an authoritarian shithole like one of the countries you mentioned or slightly less authoritarian but consider a much larger neighbouring country to be an existential threat which again.. didn't make much sense in the early 90s)

It did, it ran for the door with everyone else sentenced to time in Russia.

Not from what I've heard, see [0] for example

In 1993, Ukraine wanted to "dismantle only 36 percent of its delivery vehicles and 42 percent of its warheads, leaving the rest under Ukrainian control." Only US promising them more money got them to change the position.

[0] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/ukraine-nuclear-weapo...

Perhaps so - but imagine they could somehow have had those nukes ready to go. History would've gone differently; likely in a much, much better direction.

>Perhaps so - but imagine they could somehow have had those nukes ready to go.

What does imagining have to do with reality? Imagine you could fly, shoot lasers from your eyes and shit money out your ass. There's no point in talking about unrealistic hypotheticals. There was 0% chance UN or any world powers would approve Ukraine keeping any of those nukes they inherited from the USSR.

And even if we were to imagine they did get to keep them, given Ukraine's situation back then, it was a big chance that some of those nukes or fissile material would end up in the hands of warlords creating more way problems than what we have right now.

> History would've gone differently; likely in a much, much better direction.

And now Saddam or Ghaddafi or Binladen or 9/11 planes could have been carrying fissile material stolen from poorly kept nukes in Ukraine at the USSR breakup. How is that a better direction?

This is the issue when people make short sighted emotional arguments without considering the second order effects of what their decisions would cause. It's like the trolley problem.

If you ignore history and reality you can come up with some great fiction, sure.

You need to give my comment a very negative reading to come up with that answer.

My point - which I thought was very obvious - is that other countries should now pursue their own nuclear programmes because that is seemingly the only deterrent that works.

Do you then support Iran's nuclear program?

If Iran's nuclear program was operational there would be 100,000 less dead Palestinians, and the USA wouldn't be talking about building beachfront resorts there.

Honestly, this is a great debating question.

The point that you keep missing though is that I'm not describing my ideal state of the world. I'm describing the current state of the world.

Nukes are the only existential guarantee a state can have nowadays. The leaders of Iran would like their state to continue existing, and have set their strategy accordingly. After Russia invaded Ukraine, and Trump threatened Canada, other nations will be revisiting the calculus around nukes in the years to come.

This is much worse than the world order we had, but there you have it.

To discuss more about future, I sometimes think about Taiwan and how they are not pursuing nukes at all costs as existential threat. Nothing else could guarantee their independence than nukes and they should make nukes even at the cost of country bankruptcy if they are serious. I think they probably are not really serious about invasion. They tried it last time and some opposition party exposed the secret to US.

Taiwan has conventional rockets aimed at the three gorges dam, its similar to a nuke.

With the rhoteric China makes of invasion, those rockets didn't seem to deter them.

Taiwan pursuing nukes by itself would be an excuse for an invasion by china. And Taiwan is mostly a small island; any hiccups on a nuclear program could have devastating consequences for the population.

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