I don't think there's any question at this point that it's in Nordic self interest to develop a nuclear deterrent. This has also become true for other regions in the world.
This is all a horrible development for the overall future of humanity, but it's the world we live in now. At a minimum hundreds of billions of dollars will be siphoned off from more beneficial uses over the coming decades, and the risk of major accidents will increase. The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
Almost all of the world's nukes are controlled by aging old dictators or aspiring dictators who are surrounded by sycophants and treat competence as much less important than personal loyalty. Geopolitical risks are only going to increase as these rulers become more erratic and demented.
> I don't think there's any question at this point that it's in Nordic self interest to develop a nuclear deterrent.
Yes, it definitely is.
> The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome.
That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
> and the risk of major accidents will increase.
I don't think that's reasonable to say about a bunch of countries getting their first nuke.
The concern should be more with countries like the US and Russia that have so many nukes, which they can't possibly use effectively, and don't have the ability to properly maintain.
If every western country had exactly one nuke, the world would probably be much safer than if the US has all of them.
> A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome. That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
It's even more complex than that. If Ukraine responded conventional war with nukes, it can be sure Russia would retaliate with even more nukes, practically extinguishing their statehood.
The equilibrium is reached when the exchange is equally devastating, so the only winning move is attacking first, and only if the attacked won't be able to retaliate. The Cold War never ended, just warmed a little, because it doesn't exist (yet) a guaranteed way to avoid an all-out nuclear retaliation.
Russia didn’t start this war with the intention of getting into a protracted slugging match over 20% of Ukraine - they got into for the whole thing.
Luckily Ukraine beat back the drive on Kyiv. But if Russia’s success metric at the outset of the war (the complete capitulation and conquest of Ukraine) carried a credible risk of losing Moscow or even smaller cities closer to the front would they have been anywhere near as likely to have made such an attempt?
that was the etymology, given the world we were emerging was one where major world powers came directly to blows amongst themselves rather than through the countless small-scale, regional proxy wars we saw over the 2nd half of the 20th century.
I am not convinced that the likes of Putin or Trump would care about the total destruction of their largest city, so long as they weren't there at the time.
In light of renewed aggressions from powerful states, the only recourse smaller states have to defend themselves is to turn themselves into a fortress like Taiwan (which is prohibitively expensive for most larger states) or nuclear deterrence (which Ukraine gave up for false guarantees of protection from invasion). Guarantees aren't what they used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if many waning US allies are covertly developing nuclear capabilities.
I hope my state is because the alternative is being at the whim of the powerful nuclear states around us in a political climate of rising authoritarianism.
Anyone that has read history knows that state leaders' promises are written in the wind. Throughout history, states have traditionally behaved like dishonorable people, because their leaders have been traditionally dishonorable. It's as if it was almost a requirement, no matter the form of government.
Ukraine never had the possibility to keep its nuclear arsenal, they simply didn't have the infrastructure for it, let's not pretend they had any real choice.
I agree Ukraine could probably build a new nuclear deterrent, similar examples as you give.
> They couldn't have launched the Russian warheads as-is, but disassembly and reuse of the warhead material is another thing entirely.
Another thing entirely, yes.
But consider that Ukraine build the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, lost it in the collapse of the USSR because the (captain?) just sailed off with it: everyone would have noticed if Ukraine had tried to keep those weapons, and at least some of them would have demonstrated how upset they were with an invasion and/or by bribing guards to put them in trucks and drive them across a border (not necessarily the USSR-Ukraine border) regardless of what the government thought.
Ukraine was never a nuclear power any real sense. The USSR's bombs were parked there, and Ukraine merely had physical (but not operational) custody over them after the USSR fell. Ukraine could have kept them to bootstrap a nuclear arms program, but they didn't, so they were never had a nuclear deterrent to give up in the first place.
Nice russian talking point. UA designed developed and maintained most top tier soviet nuclear weapons. The largest nuke plant in USSR was Yuzhmash in Dnepr and largest design bureau again in UA Dnepr KB Yuzhnoe. UA had to help maintain russian nukes after the collapse of USSR cause russia lacked tech. capability.
From what I have understood, a significant part of the reason why Sweden scrapped its nuke program last time around, was that we found out that nukes pose more questions than they answer. Obviously, you need the nukes themselves, and a reliable delivery mechanism. Neither are cheap. Preferably, you want second-strike capability, which is kind of tricky. And you want some way of balancing things so that the enemy does not take a chance on that second-strike capability and nuke you first anyway. Then you need something to use them for. At the time, the targets would probably have been ports in the Baltic states, then (involuntary) parts of the Soviet union and likely starting points for the hypothetical Soviet invasion fleet. Could we really stomach the idea of killing a few thousand Estonian civilians, probably not too happy about being used as stepping stones by the Soviets? For most military targets, there are better weapons.
Of course, it has later been argued that by entering into various more or less hidden agreements with the US, we made ourselves nuclear targets anyway, with no formal guarantees whatsoever to show for it...
Given that Sweden manufactures submarines since long ago, I'm surprised second-strike capability was even a question.
Agreed that finding a target that doesn't blow back in our own face would be an issue. Though you don't really have to answer that question to have a deterrent, almost by definition.
It was a fantastic bluff from the USA to make the USSR believe that Bufford "Mad Dog" Tannen was in charge of the nukes, when in reality it was Doc. Brown.
North Korea has nukes but those in the Nordics are bragging about defeating Russia by buying heat pumps. Much of Europe has been living in a time of what amounts to ignorant bliss which Putin is slowly shaking them out of.
Germany hasn't invaded France (or vice versa) for two generations now. The Soviet Union dissolved itself peacefully by act of parliament. (Compare to Germany/Japan/Napoleon)
Building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal is possible:Look at Pakistan.
Building and maintaining an air defense system that protects your nuclear arsenal unless you own thousands of km airspace as buffer is much harder:
Look at Pakistan.
Israel is special in the sense that:
1. All its enemies are underarmed.
2. The US acts as additional deterrent.
nuclear weapons are one of those insidious technologies that are almost self-replicating in a sense, because if your enemy has nukes it strongly behooves one to either also have nukes or to buddy up with someone who has them. Opting out entirely is very difficult once the genie is out of the bottle
This whole article severely understates the difficulty of making a bomb.
There are two ways to make a bomb: either using weapons grade uranium (like the Hiroshima bomb) or weapons grade plutonium (like the Nagasaki bomb). The first requires uranium enrichment facilities and the second requires spent fuel reprocessing facilities. No such facilities exits in the Nordic countries, and both are stupendously complex. You can't just wave a want and build them. And certainly not in a clandestine way (which the author does not actually propose). If they start on this path, maybe, maybe, their own population would accept, but it's unlikely the population of other countries would accept too. Lots of the parts and raw materials needed for these facilities will need to be imported, the Nordic countries can't simply build the entire supply chain, no matter how rich they are per capita. The access to some of that upstream supply chain will be curtailed, because other countries are either strategic adversaries (Russia, China) or democracies where a large fraction of the population opposes nuclear armament. Add to that that some of the key scientists and engineers involved in such a project could be the target of assassinations (oh, wait, Russia would never do that, would it?).
I live in Norway and I agree we should have a nuclear deterrent, however this article feels like navel gazing, it’s long, projecting and speculative.
What is not discussed well is delivery systems, which we are lacking for second strike capability… submarines or complex siloes?
My only wish for the program is that we keep the capability within our control to prevent political overhead and give the current government the ability to destroy the current capabilities at a moment’s notice in case the following govt seems irresponsible. Who knows what we will look like in 200years.
Authoritarians are thriving currently precisely because of such narratives as this great replacement bs, designed to sow division and promote xenophobia and nationalism.
This is what Trump's dismantling of US power has brought us to. Our soon-to-be-former allies can't count on US nuclear deterrence to protect them, because not only is the US unreliable, but they might be the ones attacking.
We're in crazy-town because of Trump and the Republicans, with very real consequences.
They should never have relied on US nuclear deterrence to begin with, even if we were perfectly-model allies. Single points of failure are worth remediating, preferably before crises.
The UK buys its nukes from the US, so it's not really independent. (As I recall, the UK doesn't even have free choice on where those nukes are targeted).
France kicked the US military out of France in 1966 and left NATO's military command structure.
They largely rejoined in 2009 (and very deliberately never rejoined NATO's Nuclear Planning Group), but if any NATO member is capable of going it alone on this one, it's probably France.
240 nukes on subs is plenty to wave around as a stick, too.
it's easy to lay the state of the US at the feet of the GOP, but Democratic leadership has been ineffectual for decades, either by continuing GOP policies ala Bill Clinton's continuing the Reaganite policy of deregulation into the 90s or Obama's continuing Dubya-era policies in the war on terror or in simply throwing up their hands in defeat ala the Biden DoJ completely dropping the ball wrt the Jan 6th and Trump investigations or Schumer today being damn-near worthless in offering even the appearance of resistance to the dismantling of the liberal democratic apparatus of the US government.
The Democratic Party is merely the other half within the narrow confines of allowed political discourse in the mainstream. I won't go so far as to say they're controlled opposition but it is very clear that they have had no intentions of upsetting the status quo for a very long time and it has lead to the what is currently happening today.
staymad, nerds; if you think Daddy Democrat is saving the day, you are in for a rude awakening
Russia is genocidal, US unreliable and erratic. The civilized world needs nukes. Not only the Nordic countries, but also Germany and Poland. Unless Russia and US are willing to give up theirs ;)
Germany? Hell no. We need CE + Nordics to have a unified front and to keep West and East in check. Nordics + Poland + Czech Rep + Ronania and maybe a few smaller countries is the sweet spot.
There are nukes in Germany. The US has put them there. The Germans will soon have the F-35 and then when America gives the word, if she does, the Germans will be dropping those nuclear weapons. These aren't secrets.
Is it time? Maybe. Will they do it? Probably not. The European countries constantly talk and never act. It took the second Russian invasion of Ukraine for them to even barely start to do anything and even now, they are still trying to get the US to continue to be the backbone of their defense strategy. Even as the US takes actions that (in their minds) are ruining that idea, instead of acting, they just complain and condemn.
Even if tomorrow they decided to actual work together and invest in their own capabilities it would be decades before they would be free of the US defense sector and they know it and it's why they are so resistant to the idea. I think you would need to see more aggression by the Russians combined with substantially more shenanigans by the US (more than just bombastic announcements for the sake of grabbing media attention) for that to change because you are talking about trillion dollar investment, every year, for decades to walk a different path.
In Europe we do have some non US weapon systems thankfully. Maybe not as good as the US kit but quite functional on the whole. We've been a bit surprised as long time allies of the US for them to get a president who seems more fond of Russia than the democratic world. I didn't see that one coming.
You do but when it comes to certain critical areas that require very large investments in R&D to get going (space launch, 5th/6th gen fighters, nuclear deterrents, etc.) there is a significant lack of home grown capacity/capability. That's more what I was referring to in the above, you guys have plenty of comparable stuff in many areas.
Let me tell you, you folks weren't the only ones caught off guard by the current American political leadership. I think Europe is still betting this is more theater than anything and things will move back towards baseline in the long run, which I think is a fair bet, but I do wish they would hedge that bet a bit more than they are currently.
I guess you need gear which is adequate for the enemies you face which in Europe is basically Russia. It's sort of ok - the UK and France have nukes and we seem to be getting by without the 5th gen fighters. We could probably do with a local substitute for Patriot missiles.
I think the EU should effectively form a military alliance with Ukraine who are the main force against Russia at the moment and crank things up to actually win.
I find it funny that everyone complains that Europeans currently just talk and never act.. Every time Europeans acted, it ended in either a world war, of half of the war colonized.. So not sure if you really want Europeans to act..
I'm not sure how we went from the "act" being "invest in their own defense" to "start ww3" but I am quite confident no one is complaining they are not doing that, lol.
Humans being the same everywhere, the ideal condition of "we can defend ourselves, yet have no expansionist tendencies" doesn't tend to keep the words after the comma for very long.
This is also why anarchies are not very stable.
The international order, with each nation being kinda like an individual person, has few enough actors that the distinctions between "anarchy", "democracy", and "dictatorship" are blurry.
People go back and forth on this. When they are trying to sound "very smart", they'll insist "well actually, the Russians invaded in 2014!"
But something fundamentally different happened in 2022.
Remember, Zelensky was elected on a platform of negotiating with Russia for the dispossessed territory. That was acceptable 2014 - but certainly not now.
frankly I think much less than people assume. Obviously nuclear weapons need to be taken seriously but we should have taken a much more muscular posture ages ago.
There's this mental cold war image of these people grinding it out to the Armageddon but in reality the entire Russian leadership has their children living in the cities they're threatening. Putin has a daughter that manages an art gallery in Paris. Bullies back down when you punch back and that's the much better framing of modern day rogue actors.
Back in the day Biden could have said we're protecting Ukraine - invading troops will be bombed by the USAF, rather than the actual - well if you only invade a little bit we won't do much.
At the fall of the USSR, Coca-Cola should have bartered soda with Russia for the nukes. After all, the Cola Wars were heating up even as the Cold War looked to be ending, and Pepsi had a superior navy, bartered from the USSR with soda, and Coke could have used a nuclear deterent.
Russia had originally licensed Coca Cola (or Pepsi) like a decade before the fall of the Soviet union!
Stripping nation from nuclear deterrence is suicide: Ukraine did this in 1993. Both missiles, payloads and strategic bombers :/ They had it all... (Reverse engineering some command codes would be trivial as Ukrainians had top tier engineers in the entire Soviet Union).
Have the CIA turn enough insiders that one of them succeeds in assassinating Putin after a propaganda campaign raising up an opposition party ready to take over in an election/coup (mixture of both really). Have a weak and friendly leader installed that exchanges nukes for population support and possibly brakes up Russia into several smaller states.
When the USSR broke up, Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees (lot of good that has done them)
Tell me you honestly think what is happening in America right now isn't the outcome of long planning by Russian intelligence (and likely other intelligence services). Their plan was to install a leader they had chosen and influenced.
Also Epstein was probably also a spy, but more likely for Mossad. BIG COINCIDENCE he was so close with dear leader?
Then tell me you think that doing things in Russia isn't possible.
Ukraine gave up more than nukes, it forfeited future membership in russian federation and nato. All the ridiculous bush-era bluster about nato membership for ukraine was in itself a (minor) violation of budapest memo.
Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
>Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
I'm not saying that at the time it wasn't the best course of action. Something other than what happened may have been possible and may have been an improvement, but it certainly would give any future nations considering giving up their nukes a significant pause.
>Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
Again, this is the method that you would use to do it. If it were a good idea it would likely already be done. I'm not saying it's a good consequence-free course of action, that wasn't the question.
How do envision we might disarm an adversary with thousands of nuclear missiles, other than by preemptively nuking them and hoping they don't respond in time. Not really a plausible plan.
... European gas+LNG consumption has gone down by 2/3 and has largely been replaced by Americans and our president has openly threatened to steal territory from a NATO ally through force.
It's not exactly like Europe is in a comfortable place energy-wise nor can it say it doesn't need energy from any current supplier.
Western warmongering piece. Congrats on the Americans for having managed to pit Europeans against their Russian counterparts and biggest energy partners.
One could denounce this war as a preventive and thus illegal war and one would be right. However, Westerners have taunted the country for decades, and the last expension and takeover of Ukraine by western-backed fascists has pushed them into committing exactly that. If I keep provoking you with a knife, don't be surprised if I end up beating you to a pulp.
Delivery of nuclear weapon via shipping container might seem like a deterrent but it's kind of the opposite thing.
For something to be a deterrent it must have a few properties. Delivery taking a non-zero amount of time and producing a gigantic visible ordeal from outer space is a feature here. A container bomb going off somewhere in a civilian logistics chain is a surprise. Surprises cannot be deterrent by their very definition. The inability to ~instantly attribute the attack to some party would only invite additional instability.
Container ships tend to be fairly slow to respond and may not function as expected during a nuclear war.
The only way for this to work as a retaliatory measure is to have the weapons already in place at the target locations. Now, imagine if someone were to discover the weapon and trace it back to whomever installed it. This is effectively a slow motion nuclear exchange that was initiated by the "defender".
Also used to run a nuclear weapons program back in the day[1]. Though, to be honest, I think it'd be politically impossible to revive today. There's barely political will to build new nuclear power.
I do not think that nuclear power is viewed same as nuclear war heads. One is perceived as potentional ecological catasprophe and the second one as a weapon of retaliation.
I honestly don't think most people understand either. Younger generations are a bit more open minded, but for a lot of people who lived through the news reports of Cs137-fallout from Chernobyl raining down on them, nuclear anything is represents an invisible and scary boogyman.
I like this explanation why people in old soviet block tent much more to support nuclear energy. When Chernobyl accident happened, communists we're mainly silent about that but countries which we're affected and had a free press were (rightfully) panicking so general population became scared about the use of nuclear as a energy source.
I think you're being a bit dramatic. My voice is an outlier, and heavily downvoted. Being exposed to different ideas is a good thing. If you're not going to question your own views, at be grateful that others will.
> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against. Both sides have the same goal. Russia is killing swaths of European men, and that's about it. Ukraine is killing swaths of European men. The territorial control doesn't explain the war. The killing is the purpose.
By this logic Japan was aligned with USA during WW2, because both sides were killing people.
The logic remains sound, but the facts are different. There was real territorial gain / loss in the Pacific theater. Japan's imperial motives make sense, because they actually did conquer a lot of Asia / Pacific Islands. The US's defense / retaliation motives also make sense, because the US did re-take its territory and force a surrender. So, the proffered motives don't appear to be a pretext.
There's also an absence of an apparent ulterior motive. The US and Japan were also on opposite sides of the world, and had little to no prior history. It's not clear why (or along what lines) they would cooperate with each other in the presence of such real territorial conflict.
Germany is a somewhat closer case. Germany and the US had a shared history and tradition. Socialist / Communist politics were widespread in both, and the US was largely divided as to whether they would support or oppose the German socialists / war. So there is a much stronger case for an ulterior motive here. Indeed, Germany indisputably wanted many of their own people to be killed. Their leadership's desire to kill jewish German is beyond dispute... so as it relates to other classes of Germans (e.g. those who fill the Wiermact ranks)... I don't think we can rule out the possibility on the grounds that those people were (also) German.
However, to get back to the territorial aspect, Germany conquered a lot of land, and the Allies took it back. So, a closer situation to the current stalemate in Ukraine would be WWI. If they're not making any progress in terms of territory... what progress do they think they're making? The main change I see from here is that people are dying... so that's probably the whole point.
If Europe wants North America to intervene in Europe's territorial disputes, then Europe should allow North America to have dominion over North America.
It's hypocritical for Europe to claim North American territory, and then claim we should be concerned about a European nation claiming European territory.
Russia and Ukraine are both on the same continent. They're neighbors. That's a much tougher decision than whether a European nation should control Greenland... that's not even on the same hemisphere.
What are you on about. We had a great thing going until your (Assuming this is a US person speaking and not a Russian or other troll bot) president started breaking that relationship down. We never threatened to "shoot first" lol, we simply responded to the threat of having Greenland taken by force.
Our relationship has been deteriorating because it was very clear that the US was not behaving like the ally they said they were.
The "if invaded" qualifier is fair, but what I heard from Danish authorities was that they would not wait to be fired upon. They said, if US forces came, then Denmark would "shoot first" regardless of whether the US had fired a shot.
Well, it's certainly a "worthless piece of land" (or close) compared to Crimea and all of the other Ukrainian territory Europe sat by and allowed Russia to devour since 2014. And even after 2014, Europe still went ahead with Nord Stream 2, anyway.
It doesn't; you're just dense or deliberately misconstruing my posts to grind your ideological axe. Europe should have checked Russia's aggression in 2014, when it annexed Crimea, not looked the other way and continued business as usual. Now Crimea is effectively gone for good, and Ukraine will be lucky if it gets back any significant quantity of Ukraine that Russia has stolen since 2022. Imagine how Ukrainians must feel, that Europe now is apparently willing to collectively go to war, but over an island in North America, and against the United States (a much more formidable power, militarily and economically than Russia), no less, but not for them.
It's more like helping a friend move house, but he complains about you the whole time you're trying to help, and there's no pizza or beer, and when you ask to have the dusty old bread machine from the attic, they get super possessive and say they'll fight you.
And in that scenario, taking the bread machine anyways would be theft. Right?
You can say "fine, we're not friends anymore", or "that was a dick move", or "why not?" But if you take it, despite being told no, that's clearly a crime here.
The US, under Trump, also bombed and sanctioned Iran, a major ally of Russia and supplier of drones and drone parts, and kidnapped Maduro, their staunchest ally in the Western Hemisphere, and tariffed countries buying Russian energy, and seized an actual Russian-flagged (not "shadow") tanker, despite it having a submarine escort--something Europe would never have the will to do.
> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against
Also note the shift by Canada and Europe to trade more with China. Obviously some trade with China is unavoidable, but seeing them running into the arms of Beijing is quite unexpected, given that China is the single largest consumer of Russian energy exports, and in turn supplies Russia with various restricted, "dual use" components for their drone and other munitions programs, along with vital intelligence for launching strikes in Ukraine.
No, seriously, the reason the world is messed up now is that only some powers have monopoly on nuclear weapons. And every single one of the major powers is internationally in an aggressive, expansive mood.
We could have had a world without nuclear escalation.
But the last 4 years have shown that if as a country and nation you don’t have a nuclear umbrella, you don’t have recognised sovereignty and hence cannot do the single most important duty a state has - to protect the human rights of it’s citizens.
So I’m afraid the lot of the non-nuclear countries is either nuke up, or lick the boot.
Nordic countries have had nuclear power plants for half a century.
If they don't have a sufficient secret stock pile of nuclear weapons already, then they have been utter and total fools.
If they don't have secret nuclear weapons in orbit, they have been severely irresponsible.
Let's hope the plans of their leaders is not to send all young men as infantry to the meat grinder to die for a country which hates them, like they are doing in the Ukraine war. But who knows? Life is full of surprises.
to your point, historically mumps neutered some infected men. i don't know how one could calculate how much population was prevented by mumps before vaccines, though.
This article is so batty it's hard to take seriously. The Nordics are not going to be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. I know the UNSC seems toothless most of the time, but on this issue they are united.
This is all a horrible development for the overall future of humanity, but it's the world we live in now. At a minimum hundreds of billions of dollars will be siphoned off from more beneficial uses over the coming decades, and the risk of major accidents will increase. The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
Almost all of the world's nukes are controlled by aging old dictators or aspiring dictators who are surrounded by sycophants and treat competence as much less important than personal loyalty. Geopolitical risks are only going to increase as these rulers become more erratic and demented.
Yes, it definitely is.
> The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome. That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
> and the risk of major accidents will increase.
I don't think that's reasonable to say about a bunch of countries getting their first nuke. The concern should be more with countries like the US and Russia that have so many nukes, which they can't possibly use effectively, and don't have the ability to properly maintain.
If every western country had exactly one nuke, the world would probably be much safer than if the US has all of them.
It's even more complex than that. If Ukraine responded conventional war with nukes, it can be sure Russia would retaliate with even more nukes, practically extinguishing their statehood.
The equilibrium is reached when the exchange is equally devastating, so the only winning move is attacking first, and only if the attacked won't be able to retaliate. The Cold War never ended, just warmed a little, because it doesn't exist (yet) a guaranteed way to avoid an all-out nuclear retaliation.
Luckily Ukraine beat back the drive on Kyiv. But if Russia’s success metric at the outset of the war (the complete capitulation and conquest of Ukraine) carried a credible risk of losing Moscow or even smaller cities closer to the front would they have been anywhere near as likely to have made such an attempt?
What it seems to have deterred is two major states warring directly.
I hope my state is because the alternative is being at the whim of the powerful nuclear states around us in a political climate of rising authoritarianism.
Anyone that has read history knows that state leaders' promises are written in the wind. Throughout history, states have traditionally behaved like dishonorable people, because their leaders have been traditionally dishonorable. It's as if it was almost a requirement, no matter the form of government.
I suspect that is because the majority of people who would make good, honorable leaders of nations do not want the job.
They couldn't have launched the Russian warheads as-is, but disassembly and reuse of the warhead material is another thing entirely.
> They couldn't have launched the Russian warheads as-is, but disassembly and reuse of the warhead material is another thing entirely.
Another thing entirely, yes.
But consider that Ukraine build the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, lost it in the collapse of the USSR because the (captain?) just sailed off with it: everyone would have noticed if Ukraine had tried to keep those weapons, and at least some of them would have demonstrated how upset they were with an invasion and/or by bribing guards to put them in trucks and drive them across a border (not necessarily the USSR-Ukraine border) regardless of what the government thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KB_Pivdenne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivdenmash
etc.
It's rethorically dishonest to make bold claims and ask others to "google them sources".
Yuzhnoye Design Office designed the R-36 (SS-18) and it was built by Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant, both in Dnipro.
Of course, it has later been argued that by entering into various more or less hidden agreements with the US, we made ourselves nuclear targets anyway, with no formal guarantees whatsoever to show for it...
Agreed that finding a target that doesn't blow back in our own face would be an issue. Though you don't really have to answer that question to have a deterrent, almost by definition.
insane we're back here.
Instead we paid more, got hundreds of thousands of people dead, undermined our security guarantees, and all because of short term idiocy/cowardice.
The only reasonable consequence is EU countries getting nukes and getting closer to China.
And we're digging our grave further by Trump undermining NATO guarantees.
Germany hasn't invaded France (or vice versa) for two generations now. The Soviet Union dissolved itself peacefully by act of parliament. (Compare to Germany/Japan/Napoleon)
I think you'll find Finland in particular doesn't have much innocent bliss regards Russia and some history there.
Building and maintaining an air defense system that protects your nuclear arsenal unless you own thousands of km airspace as buffer is much harder: Look at Pakistan.
Israel is special in the sense that: 1. All its enemies are underarmed. 2. The US acts as additional deterrent.
There are two ways to make a bomb: either using weapons grade uranium (like the Hiroshima bomb) or weapons grade plutonium (like the Nagasaki bomb). The first requires uranium enrichment facilities and the second requires spent fuel reprocessing facilities. No such facilities exits in the Nordic countries, and both are stupendously complex. You can't just wave a want and build them. And certainly not in a clandestine way (which the author does not actually propose). If they start on this path, maybe, maybe, their own population would accept, but it's unlikely the population of other countries would accept too. Lots of the parts and raw materials needed for these facilities will need to be imported, the Nordic countries can't simply build the entire supply chain, no matter how rich they are per capita. The access to some of that upstream supply chain will be curtailed, because other countries are either strategic adversaries (Russia, China) or democracies where a large fraction of the population opposes nuclear armament. Add to that that some of the key scientists and engineers involved in such a project could be the target of assassinations (oh, wait, Russia would never do that, would it?).
Considering they got to within 6 months of finishing a bomb in 1965, I think they could probably do it again today.
What is not discussed well is delivery systems, which we are lacking for second strike capability… submarines or complex siloes?
My only wish for the program is that we keep the capability within our control to prevent political overhead and give the current government the ability to destroy the current capabilities at a moment’s notice in case the following govt seems irresponsible. Who knows what we will look like in 200years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsMcAvAITjk
We're in crazy-town because of Trump and the Republicans, with very real consequences.
But the collapse of the EU/US relationship means you probably want to plan for the potential of a similar collapse within the European alliances.
IIRC the UK has committed its nuclear weapons to defend NATO countries.
So has the US, which is part of why this is so odd of an approach. Technically we’re required to nuke ourselves if we attack Greenland.
Even if American defences stopped 80% of them, estimates say France has enough (290*(1-0.8)=58) to destroy every state capital.
Is more really necessary, if the goal is simply to deter?
They largely rejoined in 2009 (and very deliberately never rejoined NATO's Nuclear Planning Group), but if any NATO member is capable of going it alone on this one, it's probably France.
240 nukes on subs is plenty to wave around as a stick, too.
The Democratic Party is merely the other half within the narrow confines of allowed political discourse in the mainstream. I won't go so far as to say they're controlled opposition but it is very clear that they have had no intentions of upsetting the status quo for a very long time and it has lead to the what is currently happening today.
staymad, nerds; if you think Daddy Democrat is saving the day, you are in for a rude awakening
Canada has all of the resources too; SK is the 2nd largest source of uranium in the world.
I think you’re missing a few other countries
https://www.icanw.org/germany
Even if tomorrow they decided to actual work together and invest in their own capabilities it would be decades before they would be free of the US defense sector and they know it and it's why they are so resistant to the idea. I think you would need to see more aggression by the Russians combined with substantially more shenanigans by the US (more than just bombastic announcements for the sake of grabbing media attention) for that to change because you are talking about trillion dollar investment, every year, for decades to walk a different path.
Let me tell you, you folks weren't the only ones caught off guard by the current American political leadership. I think Europe is still betting this is more theater than anything and things will move back towards baseline in the long run, which I think is a fair bet, but I do wish they would hedge that bet a bit more than they are currently.
I think the EU should effectively form a military alliance with Ukraine who are the main force against Russia at the moment and crank things up to actually win.
This is also why anarchies are not very stable.
The international order, with each nation being kinda like an individual person, has few enough actors that the distinctions between "anarchy", "democracy", and "dictatorship" are blurry.
Any country (this includes both democracies and petty dictatorships) which wishes to be safe and independent must get nukes and means of delivery now.
The Domestic Politics of Nuclear Choices — A Review Essay by Elizabeth N. Saunders (pdf) - https://profsaunders.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/saunders...
Russia will be prepared to launch another attack in just a few years after the war on Ukraine ends and the US cannot be relied upon.
In fact, it's even worse as the US may end up as the enemy!
Edit: to be more clear: I can't believe that after 4 fucking years, a hostile nation is still permitted to wage war against a sovereign country.
But something fundamentally different happened in 2022.
Remember, Zelensky was elected on a platform of negotiating with Russia for the dispossessed territory. That was acceptable 2014 - but certainly not now.
No, I think what you have is mostly different people saying different things, not people going back and forth.
> But something fundamentally different happened in 2022.
Yes, an escalation in the level of conflict from the Russian side intended to bring a rapid conclusion of the war happened in 2022.
What exactly do you think their response to attempted forcible disarmament would be?
There's this mental cold war image of these people grinding it out to the Armageddon but in reality the entire Russian leadership has their children living in the cities they're threatening. Putin has a daughter that manages an art gallery in Paris. Bullies back down when you punch back and that's the much better framing of modern day rogue actors.
Now the west is mostly trying to bankrupt Russia which isn't going too badly. Oil's being kind of blocked and they've sold 71% of their gold to keep things going but that'll run out. https://united24media.com/latest-news/russia-liquidates-71-o...
Stripping nation from nuclear deterrence is suicide: Ukraine did this in 1993. Both missiles, payloads and strategic bombers :/ They had it all... (Reverse engineering some command codes would be trivial as Ukrainians had top tier engineers in the entire Soviet Union).
When the USSR broke up, Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees (lot of good that has done them)
Also Epstein was probably also a spy, but more likely for Mossad. BIG COINCIDENCE he was so close with dear leader?
Then tell me you think that doing things in Russia isn't possible.
Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
I'm not saying that at the time it wasn't the best course of action. Something other than what happened may have been possible and may have been an improvement, but it certainly would give any future nations considering giving up their nukes a significant pause.
>Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
Again, this is the method that you would use to do it. If it were a good idea it would likely already be done. I'm not saying it's a good consequence-free course of action, that wasn't the question.
This time around we must demand that it fully gives up WMDs before any help or humanitarian aid reaches it.
Then you're not paying attention. They have nukes, europe needs their gas, and the other major powers don't care about what they're doing to Ukraine.
America doesn't have hegemony any longer and its leaders and people have been subjugated by foreign powers intelligence actions.
Needed, past tense. The hold-outs today want it, they do not need it.
There's still concern about the nukes though.
It's not exactly like Europe is in a comfortable place energy-wise nor can it say it doesn't need energy from any current supplier.
They gave up their nukes to be betrayed. There will be A LOT of new countries with nukes soon because of that.
Rockets, submarines, aircraft, or even a nuke in a container ship parked in a big harbor work.
Reminds me of the Rapid Dragon missile system the US uses to weaponize cargo planes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)
I'd fully expect China and the US to be working on such things.
For something to be a deterrent it must have a few properties. Delivery taking a non-zero amount of time and producing a gigantic visible ordeal from outer space is a feature here. A container bomb going off somewhere in a civilian logistics chain is a surprise. Surprises cannot be deterrent by their very definition. The inability to ~instantly attribute the attack to some party would only invite additional instability.
You don't have to have them on a container ship. You need the credible threat of being able to do so.
The only way for this to work as a retaliatory measure is to have the weapons already in place at the target locations. Now, imagine if someone were to discover the weapon and trace it back to whomever installed it. This is effectively a slow motion nuclear exchange that was initiated by the "defender".
"Yeah, you can drop bunker busters on the silos you know about, but six months later one of your cities evaporates."
The five big nuclear powers use subs for this, but it's hardly the only option.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...
Everything is service or finance economy now. Nobody cares about science sadly (me included).
It's all Netflix & TikTok, Foodora scrolling until the end now.
I think I need to leave Hacker News soon. It has become MAGA territory
By this logic Japan was aligned with USA during WW2, because both sides were killing people.
There's also an absence of an apparent ulterior motive. The US and Japan were also on opposite sides of the world, and had little to no prior history. It's not clear why (or along what lines) they would cooperate with each other in the presence of such real territorial conflict.
Germany is a somewhat closer case. Germany and the US had a shared history and tradition. Socialist / Communist politics were widespread in both, and the US was largely divided as to whether they would support or oppose the German socialists / war. So there is a much stronger case for an ulterior motive here. Indeed, Germany indisputably wanted many of their own people to be killed. Their leadership's desire to kill jewish German is beyond dispute... so as it relates to other classes of Germans (e.g. those who fill the Wiermact ranks)... I don't think we can rule out the possibility on the grounds that those people were (also) German.
However, to get back to the territorial aspect, Germany conquered a lot of land, and the Allies took it back. So, a closer situation to the current stalemate in Ukraine would be WWI. If they're not making any progress in terms of territory... what progress do they think they're making? The main change I see from here is that people are dying... so that's probably the whole point.
> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against
This does not follow.
It's hypocritical for Europe to claim North American territory, and then claim we should be concerned about a European nation claiming European territory.
Russia and Ukraine are both on the same continent. They're neighbors. That's a much tougher decision than whether a European nation should control Greenland... that's not even on the same hemisphere.
Our relationship has been deteriorating because it was very clear that the US was not behaving like the ally they said they were.
Oh, bullshit.
They threatened to shoot back if invaded.
If Mexico said they wanted Texas and sent troops across the border, I assure you force would be rapidly used. By more than just CBP.
Is North Dakota worthless land? Is Hawaii? Willing to hand them over?
What the hell is the point of an ally if it's seizing territory from you.
I suspect they would strongly sympathize with the “we don’t want a bully to violate our treaties and steal our land”. No?
You can say "fine, we're not friends anymore", or "that was a dick move", or "why not?" But if you take it, despite being told no, that's clearly a crime here.
The US, under Trump, also bombed and sanctioned Iran, a major ally of Russia and supplier of drones and drone parts, and kidnapped Maduro, their staunchest ally in the Western Hemisphere, and tariffed countries buying Russian energy, and seized an actual Russian-flagged (not "shadow") tanker, despite it having a submarine escort--something Europe would never have the will to do.
> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against
Also note the shift by Canada and Europe to trade more with China. Obviously some trade with China is unavoidable, but seeing them running into the arms of Beijing is quite unexpected, given that China is the single largest consumer of Russian energy exports, and in turn supplies Russia with various restricted, "dual use" components for their drone and other munitions programs, along with vital intelligence for launching strikes in Ukraine.
We could have had a world without nuclear escalation.
But the last 4 years have shown that if as a country and nation you don’t have a nuclear umbrella, you don’t have recognised sovereignty and hence cannot do the single most important duty a state has - to protect the human rights of it’s citizens.
So I’m afraid the lot of the non-nuclear countries is either nuke up, or lick the boot.
If they don't have a sufficient secret stock pile of nuclear weapons already, then they have been utter and total fools.
If they don't have secret nuclear weapons in orbit, they have been severely irresponsible.
Let's hope the plans of their leaders is not to send all young men as infantry to the meat grinder to die for a country which hates them, like they are doing in the Ukraine war. But who knows? Life is full of surprises.
A lot more countries then expected had or almost had the bomb.
The UNSC has long been toothless on this issue; see North Korea.
Please read Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book by Annie Jacobsen that discusses the insanity of nuclear war.