[sfifs]

I'm very surprised the US doesn't seem to be taking the risk of Ukraine becoming a Nuclear Weapons state seriously. By now, they surely would have had time to develop get to the brink of weaponization as a backup plan - they've after all always had a nuclear industry. If they do so and offer cover to their neighbors who realize NATO may not be sufficient, we are in for interesting times.

[immibis]

Ukraine WAS a nuclear weapons state, until the US agreed to protect them from Russia with the US's nuclear weapons, if they gave up their own.

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

It wasn't. It had some weapons on their territory but could not use them. The red button was always in Moscow.

[insane_dreamer]

What actually happened to the nukes the Ukrainians had? Were they transferred to the US? Destroyed?

[polski-g]

The Senate never ratified that treaty, so no the US never agreed to so that. And the Budapest Memorandum doesn't say that anyway.

[Lapsa]

afaik Ukraine never got paid for nuclear disarmament as initially agreed - about $200 billions

[wat10000]

The US did not agree to protect them. The signatures to the Budapest Memorandum agreed to respect Ukraine's sovereignty. Of the signatories, Russia is the only one that has violated the agreement.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The ideal scenario would have been if Ukraine had secretly retained 30-100 warheads. Everyone likes to prattle on about how they couldn't even have used them: those people are mentally retarded. A sophisticated government with nuclear and aerospace scientists could have easily dismantled interlocks and installed their own. Maybe not in a hurry, but they had 3 decades more or less. And if they didn't have the expertise, they might have outsourced it to Taiwan for the fee of a few nukes to keep.

Ukraine *desperately* needs to be a nuclear weapons state. Nothing else will suffice. They need more than one bomb, really more than three or four. Putin has to be terrified that no matter how many nuclear strikes he endures, another waits to follow. When he fears that, the war will end.

[wat10000]

The war might end in Ukraine being flattened by Russian nuclear weapons if that happened. Putin would be backed into a corner. End the invasion after suffering a nuclear strike (or just the threat of one) and he'll risk being deposed and meet a gruesome end. Retaliate overwhelmingly and risk escalation from other nuclear powers. It's not clear to me that the second risk would be worse, and definitely not clear to me that Putin wouldn't see that as the better of two bad options.

As has been illustrated so well over the past few years, the power of nuclear weapons is a paradox. It allows you to make the ultimate threat. But that threat isn't credible unless people believe you'll use them. Because the consequences of using them are so severe, they're only credible if used in response to a correspondingly severe threat. Russia's arsenal hasn't allowed it to stop a constant flow of weapons to its enemy, an enemy which has invaded and still controls a small bit of Russian territory, and which frequently carries out aerial attacks on Russian territory. Ukraine faces much more of an existential threat (Ukraine has no prospect of conquering Russia, but the reverse is a serious possibility) so a nuclear threat from Ukraine would be more credible, but it could easily still not be enough. Certainly they're not an automatic "leave me alone" card.

[mc32]

I dunno if I agree with them being nuclear. It just ups the possibility of a thermonuclear war instead of a conventional war. Just as I’d prefer that IN or PK or both not having those weapons.