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Comment by alex43578 | Hacker News Reader

Even setting aside that Ukraine never had the technical means or infrastructure to operate/maintain those weapons, I don't think they would have dissuaded Russia or actually been used. Russia could turn them into a wasteland in response and 6 million people (including hundreds of thousands of men of military age) weren't even willing to stay in Ukraine, much less fight for the country. If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.

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You don't think that Ukraine, the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?

And the point of nukes isn't to launch them. By then you've already lost, you're just making good on your offer to make the other shmuck lose too.

> the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?

They don't even need that. They just needed ambiguity.

Ukraine absolutely fucked up giving up its nukes, that's abundantly clear with the benefit of hindsight.

The idea that a nation state could not make use of the hundreds of nuclear weapons in its territory is just absurd. It's sillier than the people that think disk encryption will spare them the crowbar to the face. Beyond the whole chauvinistic idea that it was "Russians" that built them in the first place.

> If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.

Do you understand that nuclear weapons don't work like that, and leaders with nuclear buttons give orders to launch nuclear weapons every few months? And only they know they're using a training launch code; everyone else finds that out when the missiles does not fly off at the end of the launch sequence.

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