Worth noting that Russia has nuclear weapons, yet elects not to use them against their near peer Ukraine.
To me a near peer implies that either side has a good chance of losing the war. It’s my opinion that Russia has not yet been at a real risk of losing this war and thus has not yet had a need to use nuclear weapons. I’m aware that the NAFO line is that Ukraine still has this in the bag - but I still don’t see a Ukrainian victory as a likely.
I assume this is why the gp post suggested ‘near peer’ implies nukes.
The reality is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent against existential threats, and all else is a bluff. So it's not a risk of losing this war that will push Russia to commit such murder-suicide, but an existential threat to its own survival as a nation.
Note that there have been numerous documented cases of near nuclear launches, especially in the 60s and 70s, it is by no means a bluff or an idle risk.
The bluff does, however, work very well in slowing down and dissuading Western help to Ukraine by cultivating the "don't do X else nukes tomorrow" memes and propaganda talking points. Very effective foreign policy tool for a nuclear-armed fascist dictatorship, other will certainly take note for future invasions.
Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
I was responding to somebody who said Ukraine was Russian’s near-peer. I didn’t say they should be considered peers now, just that they certainly weren’t when the choice was made to go to war.
The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
> Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
They also seem to be trying to get entrenched in Crimea, and IIRC brought up the idea of some promise that Ukraine wouldn’t ever going NATO, although don’t remember if that was a serious proposal or what.
You implied it.
> The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
America clearly wasn't using anywhere near all of the power it had. Neither is Russia now.
It wasn't sending every last teenager and pensioner to the front, like in the final defense of Berlin. But the simple fact is, it was throwing everything it reasonably could have at its optional colonial project, short of causing major instability for itself on the domestic front, or endangering its real (as opposed to imagined) security needs.
Until it was defeated in the way all the Western colonial powers were -- by simply being outlasted by the people that it had a delusional "need" to perpetually occupy.
Neither is Russia now.
An equally unsupported belief.
> You implied it.
No I didn’t. I left that unaddressed because I don’t care to argue it either way, or consider it relevant to my overall point.
NATO explicitly added plans to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit, and has been conducting joint military excercises with Ukraine ever since, the last one happening ~1 year before the Russian war of aggression started. The current huge NATO support for Ukraine also proves the military closeness - to the point that many of the major victories NATO weaponry firing NATO rockets with NATO targeting details to targets identified by NATO intelligence, only with Ukrainian soldiers pushing the trigger.
Not to justify Russia's clear war of aggression in any way, just explaining that Ukraine absolutely was, and likely still is, moving towards NATO membership.
That's the complete opposite of what happened. The key outcome of the Bucharest summit is that Ukraine and Georgia were explicitly denied Membership Action Plans, which would have been the crucial step needed to move their application forward. Instead they got kicked downstairs to "aspirational" status, which they both complained loudly and bitterly about. This was very, very big news at the time.
So no, Ukraine was not "absolutely moving toward membership" as of that date. They might be moving in a different direction now, but if so that's a result of the invasion, not the 2008 summit.
In any case: No, that's not why they went into the Donbas, or why they're trying to hold onto it.
Right now, Kursk is supposedly considered a major success by the Ukrainians. Let's see how that pans out.
- None of the countries (US, UK, and Russia) would threaten Ukraine’s territory
- If nuclear weapons were used against them, or they were threatened by nuclear weapons, the other signatories would “Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance”
Among other promises. So it seems like they’ve already had their promises violated.
https://warontherocks.com/2015/06/the-budapest-memorandum-an...
We also saw with DVD encryption that physical access to the device makes it tough to fully protect. Nuclear codes are protected significantly by “no one gets to tinker with the device without rapid lead poisoning”.
Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warhead. (I suspect that the PAL is not actually a separate device that can be separated from the warhead, but a series of design choices for how the warhead is constructed that make it unable to fire without the input of a cryptographic code. But then, details on this are very highly classified for obvious reasons, so we'll never know for sure.)
The real reason they didn't and don't do this is because they don't want to end up an international pariah state like Iran and North Korea. It's very clear that the U.S. has a vested interest in nuclear non-proliferation; they were the ones who gave the PALs to all our adversaries in the first place, because in the game-theoretic calculus of MAD, a small number of enemies that you can bargain and reason with is better than a large number of nuclear states even if many of those states are on your side. We would not have supported Ukraine if they attempted to retain the nukes in the 1990s, and we wouldn't support them developing nukes now.
Sure. But standing up a program makes you an international pariah. “We’re keeping this” would have had a bit less uproar.
> Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warhead.
People say this sort of thing, but it comes out that the US arsenal was set to 00000000 in fear that they couldn’t be used. I have… severe doubts on the uncrackable nature of Soviet nuclear cryptography.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
Nothing in it says anything like "if broken, Ukraine can have a nuclear program".
Загроза силою чи її використання проти територіальної цілісності та недоторканності кордонів чи політичної незалежності України з боку будь-якої ядерної держави, так само, як і застосування економічного тиску, спрямованого на те, щоб підкорити своїм власним інтересам здійснення Україною прав, притаманних її суверенітету, розглядатимуться Україною як виняткові обставини, що поставили під загрозу її найвищі інтереси.
Цей Закон набирає чинності після надання Україні ядерними державами гарантій безпеки, оформлених шляхом підписання відповідного міжнародно-правового документа.
Machine translation (Gemma2):
Each Participant of this Treaty, in the exercise of its state sovereignty, has the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it determines that exceptional circumstances related to the content of this Treaty have threatened the supreme interests of its country. Such withdrawal shall be notified to all Participants of the Treaty and the Security Council of the United Nations three months in advance. The notification shall contain a statement on the exceptional circumstances which it considers to threaten its supreme interests.
Threat of force or its use against the territorial integrity and inviolability of borders or political independence of Ukraine by any nuclear state, as well as the application of economic pressure aimed at subjugating the exercise by Ukraine of rights inherent in its sovereignty to its own interests, shall be considered by Ukraine as exceptional circumstances that threaten its supreme interests.
This Act shall enter into force after Ukraine has received security assurances from nuclear states, formalized through the signing of a relevant international legal document.
It cannot be withdrawn mid-conflict:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/tpnw-2017/art...
> Such withdrawal shall only take effect 12 months after the date of the receipt of the notification of withdrawal by the Depositary. If, however, on the expiry of that 12-month period, the withdrawing State Party is a party to an armed conflict, the State Party shall continue to be bound by the obligations of this Treaty and of any additional protocols until it is no longer party to an armed conflict.
Ukraine also isn't a signatory to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Treaty_...
Which specific agreement are you trying to quote from, because it's not the Budapest Memorandom?
https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/995_098#Text
Ukrainian law about joining the treaty:
https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/248/94-%D0%B2%D1%80#Text
As with any treaty, it can be broken/withdrawn from.
The treaty does not establish a right/recourse to a nuclear weapons program to NPT members in Ukraine's scenario. Ukraine just, when agreeing to it, said they'd leave if they had to. They would be non-compliant with the treaty, as North Korea was/is. They would be similarly sanctioned for it.
The Budapest Memorandom was a separate agreement, predicated on acceptance of the NPT. Similarly, nothing in it says "you can have a nuclear weapons program in scenario x".
Moreover, Ukraine is post-nuclear country. We had nuclear weapons and we know how to produce more.
Sanctions and loss of Western support would be virtually guaranteed.
Talk about biting the hand that feeds.
Seriously, this whole nuclear idea you're onto, while no doubt well-intentioned, is infinitely untenable for a whole bunch of plainly obvious reasons.
> Sanctions and loss of Western support would be virtually guaranteed.
This will be a good case to support the claims. Moreover, this support will be unnecessary for a nuclear country, because war will be ended very fast.
But the simple fact is, it doesn't have unlimited control over its destiny in this particular regard, and pretending otherwise won't change that fact. It is entirely dependent on Western help at this point -- its benefactors are 1000 percent against any further nuclear proliferation, and are infinitely more concerned about that issue than they are about the borders of Ukraine, or Ukraine's survival in any other sense. They have no interest in the inevitable and far wider confrontation with Russia that would ensue from such recklessness -- and they just aren't going to allow it.
Exiting it would lead to consequences from their allies, which they can’t afford.
Ukraine does not automatically leave the NPT just because Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum; such a mechanism linking the two does not exist. Ukraine would have to explicitly leave the NPT, which they will not do.
Having nukes actually in-hand changes the calculus, a lot.
They'd have been sanctioned like crazy, but invaded? No one's taking the risk that they managed to arm a bomb.
They have detonated more than 800 nukes in their history, ballistic ones from subs since 60 years ago, and have almost 2k warheads deployed.
Don't confuse the fact that they tend to start and conduct wars poorly, until cornered, with complete ineptitude.
Nuclear missiles have a lot of stuff that degrades over time. The plutonium. The conventional chemical explosives. The electronics. Were their nukes even designed to be serviced 25, 50 years in the future?
Russia went through quite a bit of economic difficulty in the waning years of communism and in the years after communism. The state of their other big expensive military toys (their navy, etc) and even their ability to equip their infantry on a personal level seems to be pretty far from ideal.
I'm not telling you that Russia doesn't have functional nukes, and it's certainly not a bluff that other nations can afford to call, but I think it's a very legitimate question.
Not to mention that their recent launch was a bit - eh.
The Soviet Union was evil, but it was somewhat competent. The russian regime is not.
As for nukes, nuclear saber rattling seems to be one of the few remaining reasons the rest of the world gives a f*ck about whatever Putin and his cronies are saying. Without nukes, the West would have massively stepped up support for Ukraine, and the Russian army would be nothing but a breadcrumb of smoldering wrecks all the way to Siberia. So I'd think that Putin has a huge incentive to keep his nuclear deterrent functional, no matter how corrupt and inept the rest of his armed forces are.
The ICBMs and SLBMs to "deliver" the nukes are more expensive and harder to develop them the nukes themselves, and Russia routinely tests those.
"harder to develop": London, not having had as much money to spend on nukes as the US and USSR had, gets its SLBMs (along with the launch tubes) from the US (whereas they make their own nukes and SLBM-carrying subs) and a few minutes of searching finds no signs of them ever developing an ICBM. (In fact, they might never have had ICBMs: they certainly don't now.)
The one you describe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile) - is being actively phased out.
> Despite the Russian claims that the missile is on 'combat alert', since its 2022 flight test, it has experienced four failed tests, the most recent on 21 September 2024
We have the short opportunity window, when Satana stopped to work and Sarmat is not working yet.
Even if 1% are operational, they could devastate the US.
Russia has 2000. What percentage of them are you willing to gamble are working? Are 10% of them working? That's 200 US cities.
So, no. We are absolutely not going to follow your logic. There is too much chance that they have enough nukes working to make us infinitely regret a nuclear exchange.