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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15287 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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whose security they have guaranteed in the 90s

I assume you are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine surrendered all of its nuclear weapons. That Memorandum famously did not use the term “security guarantee”, but rather the utterly toothless “security assurance”.

The political reality on the ground after the USSR's dissolution was that as long as nuclear warheads and launchers remained on Ukrainian (and, for the record, Byelorussian and Kazakh) soil, there was a high chance of corrupt local officials (that is, pretty much all of them) selling at least some of them to the first North Korean / Libyan / Iranian / Iraqi / Jihadist / Pakistani / Algerian etc. agent that secretly lands in a private jet with bags of gold and cash.

The prevention of this was the most and probably only important consideration on the minds of those who came up with the idea of the Budapest Memorandum in the first place in Washington DC. Everything else about it is just irrelevant gibberish in comparison, and frankly anyone who brings up the Budapest Memorandum and yet keeps silent about this is a liar with an agenda.

On a sidenote, it were basically the same considerations that drove the construction of the ISS, which was in effect nothing but a make-work project designed to employ those post-Soviet scientists who'd otherwise have been recruited by Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan etc. in about 5 minutes to design missiles, rocket engines, nuclear weapons etc.

It also notably was not binding on either the US or Russia (in the case of the US, such treaties have to be ratified by Congress). The concern at the time was that Ukraine didn't have the funds to even pay soldier wages let alone secure or maintain the Soviet weapons stockpiles, so this was a more of a "pat on the back, don't worry, here's some cash for your nukes" agreement.

It's also worth noting that both the US and Russia trot out this Budapest Memorandum line when convenient. Russian propaganda mentioned it several times back during the Maidan crisis in 2014 and it was just as silly then.

Russian propaganda mentioned it several times back during the Maidan crisis in 2014 and it was just as silly then.

Sillier, actually; I don't recall any noise among the Western nations about biting off any territory from Ukraine.

Nope. But there was western discussion of who would be the leader of Ukraine

With which Russia had also previously interfered (2004, Viktor Yushchenko).

by which Ukraine surrendered all of its nuclear weapons.

Ukraine never had any nuclear weapons. They were all Moscow ones. It's like saying that Turkey will surrender its nuclear arsenal if/when the US brings them back home from Incirlik

I think this makes some questionable assumptions about the "rightful" structure of the Soviet empire. As far as I know, those were Soviet weapons, paid for and made by Soviet citizens, some of whom were Ukrainian, and the other SSRs. That permanent control would belong to the (former!) capital unreasonably privileges it over the other fragmenting client states.

I don't think it would be reasonable, for example, for the British to have demanded back all their military assets from newly-independent nations as their empire fragmented. "But those ships and guns belong to London!" seems an odd rallying cry for things in many cases the colonies themselves funded.

But in realpolitik terms, I suppose it did make sense at the time to limit the number of resulting nuclear states for proliferation reasons.

They have permissive action links though, nukes are unlike other weapons in that they don't 'just work'. Only decisionmakers in Moscow could fire them (otherwise any rogue commander could go and write Dr Strangelove fanfiction in the history books).

I think that's a valid concern in the short term, but I wouldn't expect access control features like permissive action links to prevent a nuclear-capable nation (Ukraine has nuclear plants and engineers) from repurposing weapons it its possession for an extended duration. I assume it's more like a password on a locked computer, but maybe it's more intrinsic than that (I doubt the details are public enough to know).

The better analogy would be, suppose the US broke up and, say, Texas and California became independent states (in the international relations sense), with California internationally recognized as the “successor state” of the US.

Would formerly-US nuclear weapons, located in Texas for the purpose of deterring an invasion through Texas’s flat and quickly-traversible terrain, manufactured by personnel from all over the former-US (including California), but maintained and operated primarily by Texans, become rightfully Californian overnight? What about all other formerly-US military hardware/personnel in the former-US?

Anyway, back in the real world, the point remains that no signatory to the Budapest Memorandum ever provided Ukraine with any kind of “security guarantee”. Indeed, the Americans were well aware of the military obligations such wording would entail, and thus specifically insisted on the weaker “security assurance”.

In this hypothetical scenario, Texas would control the vast majority of the US nuclear arsenal due to the Pantex plant.

'Which states would have nuclear weapons if the US hypothetically balkanized' is an answered question.

The California and Texas Republics had better not cross the Kingdom of North Dakota. It has the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal.

Yes, in this scenario it’s behind only Russia and Texas, while California has an extremely small arsenal.

The US NATO nuclear umbrella is maintained by US troops stationed in those countries.

In contrast both the warheads and thier fuzing elements were in the custody of the UAF making them Moscow's in name only.

Is this true? I read the exact opposite, this question probably has an objectively correct answer. If anybody has a good source for this I'd appreciate them saying so because I don't know who to believe. I don't think Ukraine would have given up the weapons if they were actually useful, so I'm inclined to believe they were cryptographically locked out of arming them.

As per Wikipedia, Russia maintained control over the weapons in Ukraine. The situation was probably analogous, from what I can tell without having gotten into the weeds.

The hard-to-replace components (the fissile material and the polonium initiators) were physically in Ukraine and under Ukrainian control. The Russians controlled the codes needed to arm the nukes, and if the PALs worked as advertised this means that the Ukrainians couldn't arm or detonate the nukes.

Disassembling the nukes for components and building a Ukrainian bomb was probably beyond the capabilities of 1990's Ukraine, but would be well within the capabilities of a functioning middle-income country. The N-th country experiment suggested that building a working nuke with access to the required materials and 1960's technology was a "two smart guys in a garage" level project.

They definitely were in Ukraine, but I think, from my limited poking around, that it might be an overstatement to say they were under Ukrainian control. From what I understand, parts of the Russian and Ukrainian military didn't disaggregate until at least 1997 (when the Black Sea Fleet was split), and Ukraine agreed in 1991 that the nuclear weapons would be controlled from Moscow under the auspices of the CIS. Furthermore, the troops that physically controlled the Ukrainian nuclear weapons were...not necessarily loyal to Ukraine:

In Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, the rocket armies, missile divisions and bomber commands were led by Russian generals, operated and maintained by Russian officers and men. They were controlled from higher headquarters in the Russian capital for their personnel, funding, communications, nuclear safety standards, security systems, even their operational targets. Their professional loyalty was to Russia, but their armies and commands were located in another nation’s territory. Consequently, the commanders of the air divisions and rocket armies stationed in Kazakhstan and Belarus faced conflicting pressures, just like Colonel General Mikhtyuk and general officers in the 43rd Rocket Army in Ukraine.

According to the DTRA report, Mikhytuk and most of his men refused to take an oath of loyalty to Ukraine in 1992.

The above is from a 2014 Defense Threat Reduction Agency report ("With Courage and Persistence") about US disarmament programs. It's also something I found by reading the Wikipedia page on the Budapest Memorandum – so this isn't something I know a lot about, and I'm certainly open to counter-points on the matter. This is all somewhat new to me – I had kinda thought the weapons were stranded in Ukraine with Russia holding onto the PAL codes until I noticed that Wikipedia insisted the weapons were never under Ukrainian operational control.

Agree on the ease of building atomic weapons.

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