> not crazy about the mushroom cloud icon

Ironic, given Ukraine wouldn’t be in this situation had it not given up its nuclear weapons on the back of promises—from the U.K., U.S. and Russia—that its territory would be respected [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the agreement to protect Ukraine from a Russian invasion in exchange for it's nuclear weapons. However the agreement was never submitted it for ratification by the U.S. Senate. So in effect in the words of the Brooking institution it became a 'politically binding but not legally binding agreement.'

LOL. Most treaties the US signs are politically "binding" but have no effect because there is no underlying statute created to enforce them.

tl;dr: treaties are PR shams

The tl;dr is not true however. There is binding international law affecting certain treaties, and some kind of treaties and parties do expect ratification from each signatories' internal legislative body. (e.g. totally random example https://www.jta.org/archive/french-senate-ratifies-lausanne-...)

Your body is correct though: Now why the US follows a counter-pattern and why Ukraine did not ask for ratification is another discussion, that I consider to be long term harmful.

From the Ukraine's side/pov: it will be politically not wise for the U.S.A. to back out of the protection treaty. There is good will capital that is lost, just for allowing this 8 year situation to occur.

The 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was specifically a memorandum, not a treaty. It was never intended to be submitted to the US Senate for ratification.

> Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was specifically a memorandum, not a treaty

Nobody in this thread claimed it was. A signed memorandum is still a promise and an agreement, even if not ratified as a treaty. We broke an agreement with Ukraine, letting her get sacked. We didn’t breach a treaty.

Lies on a handshake may not get far in court. They’re still lies.

In what sense were they Ukraine's nuclear weapons? They were physically inside Ukraine but controlled by Russia, as the article you linked makes clear.

They were Ukraine's in the sense that they had physical possession and unlimited time to circumvent the locks ("permissive action link", PAL). It's true the PALs may have been very non-trivial to circumvent (e.g., some PALs require a code to decrypt firing parameters), but I haven't seen anyone argue that this wasn't still vastly easier than developing weapons from scratch. Ukraine had substantial nuclear weapons expertise; it was not just a physical hosting site of the weapons.

It is hard to guess because politics is complicated and it is a hypothetical, but I'd be surprised if they really had unlimited time to circumvent the locks. If they hadn't given them up peacefully, for all we know somebody might have decided to take them by force.

At the time, Russia couldn't even quickly deal with Chechnya by force.

Other people have thought that "At the time, Russia couldn't even..." and regretted it.

Can you give some examples? I brought up Chechnya because it declared independence literally at the same time as Ukraine, and Russia waited for 3 years before finally sending the troops in (and that turned out to be a huge mess!).

Hitler mainly. Napolean? those are the classic examples. Both thought Russia was an impotent land of peasants. It's not like Russia has been invaded that many times.

If soviet russia's PAL locks were built anything like US's security measures where it's actually subtle timing information they would have to rip out and completely rebuild the explosive shell that trigger the nuclear reaction, at which point you essentially are creating new nukes from scratch.

1. It's not obvious to me you can't reverse-engineer the necessary timing information, especially when you have a bunch of nuclear weapons experts and a huge stockpile allowing you to take apart a few and use that knowledge on the rest. To my knowledge, the PAL system was intended to prevent weapons from being detonated by rouge officers or thieves; it wasn't designed to thwart states.

2. Even if all the conventional explosions are worthless, you still have all the nuclear material and other extremely sophisticated equipment involved with boosting, etc. It's not like creating new nukes from scratch.

I think for this conversation to continue productively, we need experts to weigh in on these issues.

> detonated by rouge officers

Presumably they would be part of the red army?

Just gonna point out that trying to hack a Nuke would be very high on that list of "NOPE" jobs I have in my head.

Either you brick a nuke in which case your boss bricks you, or the nuke bricks you and your local region.

They're not movie bombs where doing something wrong sets them off. PALs were very much the fail safe kind of device because if messing with them could set off the warhead then you've just discovered the way to detonate the warhead which a PAL was designed to prevent from happening. Nukes are also relatively safe in that it requires a very carefully timed sequence of explosion to properly implode the core so an accidental triggering is just a dirty bomb instead of a nuclear detonation.

It depends on what level the detonation was triggered at. An accidental detonation that actually triggers the primary device detonation mechanism could result in the bomb actually going off.

If an accidental detonation means just triggering some of the explosives, then yes, you'd get a dirty bomb. However, it's actually more likely that the bomb would actually detonate than the explosives being partially set off... they're designed specifically to be hard to detonate unless the actual detonator mechanism is used.

Honestly, the biggest risk in failure is that the missile gets launched, but the payload is a dud. So now, your country gets the punishment for launching a nuke, but none of the benefits.

> just a dirty bomb

You'd be just as dead.

Mostly if you're not smart enough to work remotely in which case you're probably not the person to be trying to bypass a PAL in the first place. And again they're not designed to trigger the bomb incorrectly if messed with because the whole point is to make them unusable unless you have the PAL code.

One might easily imagine an energetic disabling event that doesn't result in nuclear yield. Just fire one detonator.

That said, Command Disable mechanisms on modern weapons don't result in a loud bang. However, there's no guarantee those mechanisms are all that are used in mechanisms which may deter physical penetration of vital areas of the weapon.

It's easy to imagine but also it makes these immensely more dangerous to house and transport. Why fail dangerous when scrambling the timing information is as effective at preventing a nuke from being used?

Or the nuke does an intentional fizzle (sets off the implosion in an intentionally asymmetric manner resulting in plutonium being spread all over, but no nuclear criticality) which seems like the most serious-but-still-plausible "fuck you for trying this" mechanism I can think of.

A fizzle is just a nuclear weapon that doesn't reach its design potential yield, which isn't the same thing as no nuclear criticality.

A 5 MT hydrogen bomb that "only" yields 750 kt of explosive power is a fizzle, but you don't want to be anywhere near when it happens.

Yeah, fizzle was a bad choice of word. I'm not sure what you'd call an intentionally subcritical detonation, though.

How much of nukes is even hardware vs software? I'd naively think that you'd probably just rip out the core of the device and wire up a new thing that can zap it to go boom.

Nuclear bombs are strongly disinclined to "go boom" unlike say TNT. Turning the energy from splitting atoms into a large explosion, which is what you want from a weapon, will require precise timing. If you get it wrong either nothing happens, or you maybe create a small detonation, and cover a modestly sized area with dangerous debris from the failed attempt. Just throw a box of grenades into a waste water treatment plant or something instead for a fraction of the cost.

For reference, there have been a number (dozens, at least) of nuclear devices dropped accidentally all over the world (some of which landed in the USA), but none have ever accidentally detonated.

This was a plot device in the popular Fallout games. Where a city had built up around a nuclear bomb which failed to detonate during a nuclear war.

Isn't getting the timing right just "zap all the bits at the same time" ?

Are these still basically a soccer ball of explosives encircling a core of subcritical nuclear material that "just" needs to be compressed?

I think all of my knowledge of nukes might be based on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Project_(film) xD

The timing of the explosives around the core is extremely important to actually getting a nuclear detonation instead of just a dirty bomb so the precise timing and triggering of the detonators is a very critical part of the bomb. They're not just simple fuses you can light and run away.

Then use rad-hard arduino/esp-32/cortex-m0/RittzkenfaiiV/whatever equivalents running NTP / Precision Time Protocol(PTP) in a cluster, with the elements embedded in the individual explosives. Maybe read about https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+fourth+generation+nuclear+weapons and how that could be applied to the material at hand, Ka-Boom!

You can, but it's not as simple as it sounds. Since the timing of the explosives is critical to achieving a nuclear explosion, you can't really do the timing all in software. You need a specialized network of switches that splits the detonation signal several times so that all the explosives go off at exactly the same time. Even the wires have to be cut to the same length with a tiny margin of error.

You can replace the timing and electronics mechanism prior to that network, but probably any sort of tamper resistant mechanism for a weapon will remove part of that network of switches if removed from the device. The rest of the controls are just too easy to replace to be effective at keeping someone from a roll your own type solution.

I think about nuclear physics and high performance aerospace as the distinction between hardware and software shrinking to zero.

You're effecting physical operations (movement, explosions) on such tight timescales that the software becomes part of the hardware. You can't just run the code on a different setup: the code is defined by the hardware it's running on, because it's orchestrating the physical properties of the hardware it's running on.

As an analogy, think about programming early video game systems or computers, where a single clock cycle was critical. Is the software just software? Or is it intertwined with the hardware it's running on? (See: emulators having to mimic actual hardware performance)

Pick nukes from a country that doesn't use PALs - like the UK.

Edit: Physically getting hold of a UK nuke might be a bit tricky....

They were the Soviet Union's nukes. That organization ceased to exist.

The section of the Soviet military controlling those nukes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43rd_Rocket_Army) became a part of the Ukranian military. Why wouldn't their equipment?

Ukraine never had the control of those nukes.

“Until then, Ukraine had the world's third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile, of which Ukraine had physical, but not operational, control. Russia alone controlled the codes needed to operate. Their use was dependent on Russian-controlled electronic Permissive Action Links and the Russian command and control system” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

> Russia alone controlled the codes needed to operate

If Ukraine had held on to those nukes, disconnected, an engineer today could re-work them to function under Kiev’s command. (American PALs from the era have de-classified weaknesses that merited upgrades. Post-USSR nuclear safekeeping was roundly criticised for decades [1].)

Even barring that, possessing fissile material is no small feat. It would give Kiev the credible capability to e.g. threaten large sections of Russian agricultural production. That’s the sort of thing that deters tanks.

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SE-11.pdf

And there was this: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/05/02/weekly-document-t... and this:

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/01/04/weekly-document-8...

> “Until then, Ukraine had the world's third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile, of which Ukraine had physical, but not operational, control. Russia alone controlled the codes needed to operate. Their use was dependent on Russian-controlled electronic Permissive Action Links and the Russian command and control system”

I don't know where they got it, the book author cited in Wiki. The man cited read too much Tom Clancy I guess.

USSR nuclear weapons had no permissive action links as such

Kazakhstan's, and Ukrainian's nukes were fully operational, sans confused nuclear weapons officer command chain.

The launch codes were employed, but they were used solely for checking the authenticity of launch, and targetting commands.

> They were the Soviet Union's nukes. That organization ceased to exist.

I agree with some of what you say, but "the Soviet Union ceased to exist" is too simplistic. The codes necessary for firing the weapons (without modification) were controlled by military leaders largely in Russia.

The former states of the USSR agreed that Russia was the continuator state of the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_of_states#Soviet_Un... The "the Soviet Union ceased to exist" argument was also used to circumvent the agreement not to expand NATO towards the east. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16117-document-06-record-...

> the agreement not to expand NATO towards the east

This is a myth. There was a discussion in the midst of a negotiation that mentioned this. The final agreement, the Budapest Memorandum, which everyone is presently violating, did not.

There were multiple assurances made throughout the years in diplomatic comminques that were later declassified including James Baker's famous "not one inch eastward".

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...

It just didnt appear in any treaty.

For the Soviet Union I think the notion that diplomatic assurances were meaningless unless backed by a treaty wasnt considered.

Lots of ideas were mooted and abandoned in the transcript [1]; it's revisionist to fixate on that one.

If you and I are negotiating the purchase and sale of a car, I say 10, you acknowledge my 10 and say 20, and we settle on 15, my heirs can’t later claim you said 10 and so agreed to it. That is the nonsense argument being raised here.

Even Gorbachev, to whom these statements were made, concurs he never understood there to be an agreement.

[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16117-document-06-record-...

Was the code 00000000?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nu...

Most people recognize Russia to be the successor state to the Soviet Union, much like how they recognize that the Fifth French Republic is the successor state to the Fourth French Republic.

I'd be more inclined to see the CIS as the successor.

The Fifth French Republic may be the successor to the Fourth, but that doesn't mean Algeria is still French.

> In what sense were they Ukraine's nuclear weapons? They were physically inside Ukraine but controlled by Russia, as the article you linked makes clear

Possession is nine-tenths of the law [1].

Soviet weapons in Ukraine serviced by Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved had no clear owner. Russia would have had to seize them to gain control. Ukraine would have needed to develop or contract out servicing expertise.

To say nothing of the threat even inoperable nukes pose. If Ukraine had unserviced warheads in 2014, do you really think they would have found nobody who could get them working again?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_is_nine-tenths_of_t...

Ukraine also probably had half the engineers and scientists that built the damn things in the first place considering how much of the Soviet nuclear industry was located in Ukraine at the time.

They ended up with the 3rd largest nuclear stockpile and whilst they would probably would get invaded by both sides if they didn’t surrender the nukes and attempted to assert operational control over them they surely had that capability.

Also back then the primary fear was that some of those nukes would end up on the open market, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, North Korea heck even South Africa back then were all likely buyers.

South Africa had its own nuclear weapons. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...

Those were simple gun-type pure fission weapons (~6 kiloton), which are two orders of magnitude smaller than the typical thermonuclear weapons (~1 megaton) left by the USSR in Ukraine.

I don't think Russia would've accepted a country nearby with nuclear weapons.

It would have become the russian version of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Not really. Maidan would never happen if Ukraine had nukes.

They actually posted a video on their twitter of a mushroom cloud somewhere last week, then deleted it. I followed them for a long time, but recently they have gone full conspiracy-theorist. They frequently post videos, photos, or rumors with no source, and when you ask them the source they just say "you should trust us". These aren't UN observers, they are quite extreme and scaremongering on their twitter.

I thought they were deploying tactical nuke launchers on position or something, I don't believe they'd ever use them though.

However, I appreciate their optimism in assuming the site would still be up in the event they need to use the actual nuclear symbol.

Is it appropriate to flag the link for that same reason?