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Notes -
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.
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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.
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