My previous comment:
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
opportunity cost-wise, iran could have poured all the money they did in nuclear enrichment instead into missiles, air defense, etc, and they would not be having as much problems as they do now.
nuclear enrichment is extraordinarily expensive and really not all that great of a deterrent when you have them. just look at fairly recent tussels between india, pakistan and china. Russia was invaded and didnt nuke ukraine.
I thought Ukraine surrendered her nukes?
Ukraine never had nukes. It's like saying Alabama had to give up their nukes after gaining independence
This is wrong. The gotcha underpinning this point denies reality of the situation, that Ukraine had warheads and the technical capability to take control of those warheads. There is no discussion here.
That's an idiosyncratic take on the facts that basically everyone else agrees to interpret otherwise.
Ukraine and weapons of mass destruction
Ukraine, formerly a republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, once hosted Soviet nuclear weapons and delivery systems on its territory.[1] The former Soviet Union had its nuclear program expanded to only four of its republics: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. After its dissolution in 1991, Ukraine inherited about 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each, 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads apiece, as well as 33 heavy bombers, totaling approximately 1,700 nuclear warheads that remained on Ukrainian territory.[2] Thus Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world (possessing 300 more nuclear warheads than Kazakhstan, 6.5 times less than the United States, and ten times less than Russia)[3] and held about one third of the former Soviet nuclear weapons, delivery system, and significant knowledge of its design and production.[4] While all these weapons were located on Ukrainian territory, they were not under Ukraine's control.[5]
In 1994, Ukraine agreed to transfer these weapons to Russia for dismantlement and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders.[6][7] Almost twenty years later, Russia, one of the parties to the agreement, invaded Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently also from 2022 onwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_de...
Btw, reference [5], used to justify the absurd claim that those weapons were in Ukraine's territory but not under its control, goes like this:
{{cite Hansard |url=https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993... |title=Nuclear Weapons |speaker=[[Jeremy Hanley]] |position=Minister of State for the Armed Forces |house=[[House of Commons (United Kingdom)|House of Commons]] |volume=227 |date=June 22, 1993 |column=154 |access-date=September 9, 2018 |quote=Some weapons are also possessed by Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, but these are controlled by the Commonwealth of Independent States.}}
So it's basically the words of a UK MP assuring his audience that, nooo, don't worry, Ukraine doesn't control its WMD.
Or we can all shoot ourselves in the face. Faster, cheaper, and guaranteed to work every time. Ish.
Anti-nuclear proliferation should now be treated as crime against humanity. Nuclear proliferation is only way to ensure world peace. Every single country should get nukes and capability to use them against each others. And be fully ready to do it.
I hope you and I never get the opportunity to learn how this would end. We’ve had nukes on Earth for less than 100 years, do you expect the next few thousand to go that well? Do you think in that time, nobody will ever roll a nat 1 on a wisdom check?
https://www.angryflower.com/422.html
Let's bring this idea to an ultimate level- each country to have a warhead able to wipe everything, sort of project Sundial...
After all if your country is too small, it may be worthless to have nukes that probably would be destroyed by neighbors on launch...
That would work. Reasonable power balance would be reached. And negotiations could happen from equal perspective.
One step further: every man, woman and child should have a launch button.
(My bet would be: max one day)
Can't tell if sarcasm
> My advice for rulers … hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
Just need one flight from Pyongyang. Why suggest involving a major power given that you’ve just laid out the strategic need for nuclear weapons to deter interference from… major powers? Your post lacks coherency.
If nukes are so good why Israel isn't safe? Or in other words you overestimate how useful nukes are. On contrary for Iran them having nukes mean Israel have to guess if coming missiles contain nukes or not and whatever to strike back with their own nukes where as now they can freely sand missiles without escalation concerns.
Israel isn't safe? They are probably the most well defended country on the earth. A very capable domestic military and the full power of the US as an attack dog willing to do their bidding.
They have good defence, but:
- it costs money and attention
- good is not the same as perfect (there are some casualties from time to time)
Nukes do not help against guerilla warfare: their destructive power is so big that they are really unreasonable attack weapon, and only a deterring factor instead.
They protect against being "policed" by big world countries.
Eg. if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, Russia would not have been invading them (or are they "protecting" them, as promised when they took their nuclear arsenal for destruction?). If Iran or Iraq had nuclear weapons, they would not have been bombed by US.
>If nukes are so good why Israel isn't safe?
Israeli nukes are the main reason we haven't had regime change in Tel Aviv at the hands of a Turkish/Egyptian/Saudi/Iranian coalition. Israeli nukes are why Iran has had to settle into a pattern of slow, distant, annoyance via proxy forces (which lack a capability for existentially challenging the IDF).