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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

Ukraine had some parts of the nuclear weapon system, but it didn’t have the system as a whole. There’s all kinds of very specialised plants and tech the country has to develop and maintain, and USSR made a point to distribute all industries (not only nuclear or even military) and supply chains among the republics. To be able to demolish a city in 2023, Ukraine would have not only not given the weapons away, but also invest tens (or hundreds) of billions of dollars over the years, developing some components completely from scratch.

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I think the point is that Russia would have been worried Ukraine had done exactly that.

Publicly giving up all your nuclear stockpile is the complete opposite.

Until quite recently (and there is still a massive and extremely hard road ahead) Ukraine was basically a failed state and/or a Russian puppet. So I doubt Russia would’ve had to worry about something like that at all.

Ukraine had a functioning public health and transportation systems, universities that attracted students from other countries, a music industry that had outcompeted Russia in its own language, and tech sector with senior dev salaries routinely going up to $60-100k - and that’s just the things I have had first hand experience with. For all it’s problems, it definitely wasn’t a failed state.

For some people living there it wasn’t. On average however it was, there is no way around it extreme corrupt/poverty, GDP per capita on the same level as 3rd world countries.

It started off more or less on the same level as the Baltics, Bulgaria, Romania and not that far from Poland. But economically it permanently remained in the 90s. Unfortunately it's an extremely poor country by European (both Eastern and Western) standards

> dev salaries routinely going up to $60-100k - and that’s just the things I have had first hand experience with

IIRC those developers paid(pay?) approximately no taxes which would partially explain the below subsistence level retirement pensions?

> Unfortunately it's an extremely poor country by European (both Eastern and Western) standards

Yes. Which is still pretty far from "failed state". Somali, Afghanistan and Venezuela are failed states. A lot of countries around the world are just poor. But in case of countries like Argentina or Ukraine, you have to keep in mind that they can at the same time be very cheap — and thus offer a much higher standard of living to their citizens that you would imagine just by looking at dollar figures.

> IIRC those developers paid(pay?) approximately no taxes which would partially explain the below subsistence level retirement pensions?

It also explains suspiciously low official GDP stats in Russia, Ukraine and other countries in the region. A lot of economic activity is completely invisible to the government and, therefore, statistics.

North Korea managed.

So what? That’s not particularly relevant

It is, it shows how little a country needs to maintain/develop nukes

They dedicated massive amounts of resources to this over very long periods of time. This wouldn’t be possible at all even in somewhat less restrictive authoritarian states let alone somewhat democratic ones like Ukraine.

There is no way any government in Ukraine during economic turmoil of the 90s that decided to spend billions on developing nukes would’ve stayed in power.

So I still don’t see how is that in anyway relevant?

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