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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25122 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Let's not forget that Ukraine had inherited a ton of the USSR's nuclear stockpile when it had collapsed and they were pressured to give them up and transfer them to Russia in exchange for security guarantees. Oops!

Ukraine did not have either the PAL codes or control over the troops that operationally controlled the nuclear weapons. "US stole our nukes" is going to be Ukraine's "stabbed in the back" narrative but the truth is that Ukraine never had the nuclear weapons except inasmuch as they were parked on Ukrainian soil. Quite possibly Ukraine would have gotten invaded 30 years ago if they had tried to touch the nuclear weapons on their territory, and it might very well have been a joint US-Russian operation.

[Now, to be fair to Ukraine, I really do suspect they were treated rather badly by the US.]

Yes, I don't disagree on either point, although I would note that the Budapest Memorandum was not a security guarantee from the US (at least, not one that obligates the US to defend Ukraine) and that in any event the US has maintained that it was nonbinding (and of course spinning up a nuke program might be more of a hazard to some than no nuke program.)

Nukes you can't fire aren't really nukes per se. They were pressured to give them up because they weren't useful to Ukraine and having the raw materials floating around is incredibly dangerous.

But yes, everyone who doesn't have nuclear weapons should want them. I suspect one of the original reasons America started playing World Police is to reduce the incentives for smaller countries to obtain nukes.

As an American it remains an insane oddity to me that Pakistan wasn't given the Gulf War treatment in 1998 after its nuclear tests. We didn't even totally suspend aid!

The Gulf War was against states with no nuclear weapons, no? The theory is once you have nuclear weapons, you will not get messed with, and that still holds here.

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