Ask Ukraine how much it cost them to get rid of theirs.
Creating a world that results in that conclusion may go down as one of the greatest policy failures in history, and if we do in the end have an atomic war I think that's where the responsibility lay.
Ultimately we have failed as a species to rise morally above "might makes right" and I think we are going to pay for that.
IMHO that's almost the definition of civilization.
We really need to get out of the economy of scarcity. Without that, war and aggression are unavoidable.
You can see evidence for this as one of the first things Russia did was reopen those canals so water started flowing to Crimea again.
That might not have been the only goal, but it was certainly one of the bigger reasons for the attack.
The war in Ukraine is only a war of resources in very minor ways. It is much more about egos, nationalism and the idea that Russia deserves to be an empire.
That wasn't a war though, nobody called it a war between Ukraine and Russia at the time. Read news from the time, no mention of war between Ukraine and Russia.
The Ukraine war was very different than Russia other aggressions, the resource scarcity likely triggered this extra aggressive behavior. You can say this resource scarcity was ultimately their fault, but a starving beast will fight very aggressively regardless whose fault it is that its starving.
If the Crimean water crisis didn't happen then likely Russia would just have continued to incite rebellions and annex territory that way, and not declare a full scale war.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/europe/ukraine.html
>The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine. It then supported Russian paramilitaries who began a war in the eastern Donbas region... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
It not being in US news doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Russians tried to occupy Ukraine and destroy Ukrainian culture and identity for centuries. That is the real goal.
The war was inevitable. Here is from 2014: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28229785
In a scarcity economy we use scarcity to assign value to goods. We also game the system by manufacturing scarcity when needed (blocking export of critical minerals, manipulating supply and availability to avoid price fluctuations, and so on).
Those bombs were Ukraine's in the same sense that the bombs in Minot AFB are North Dakota's. If the US were to suddenly fall apart (as the USSR did), North Dakota wouldn't suddenly become a nuclear power just because the bombs are physically stationed there. They could use them to jump-start a nuclear program, but those are otherwise orphaned bombs with no one having immediate means to control them.
Russia even threatened invasion if Ukraine started messing with those nukes.