My point - which I thought was very obvious - is that other countries should now pursue their own nuclear programmes because that is seemingly the only deterrent that works.
The point that you keep missing is that I'm not describing my ideal state of the world. I'm describing the current state of the world.
Nukes are the only existential guarantee a state can have nowadays. The leaders of Iran would like their state to continue existing, and have set their strategy accordingly. After Russia invaded Ukraine, and Trump threatened Canada, other nations will be revisiting the calculus around nukes in the years to come.
This is much worse than the world order we had, but there you have it.
What does imagining have to do with reality? Imagine you could fly, shoot lasers from your eyes and shit money out your ass. There's no point in talking about unrealistic hypotheticals. There was 0% chance UN or any world powers would approve Ukraine keeping any of those nukes they inherited from the USSR.
And even if we were to imagine they did get to keep them, given Ukraine's situation back then, it was a big chance that some of those nukes or fissile material would end up in the hands of warlords creating more way problems than what we have right now.
> History would've gone differently; likely in a much, much better direction.
And now Saddam or Ghaddafi or Binladen or 9/11 planes could have been carrying fissile material stolen from poorly kept nukes in Ukraine at the USSR breakup. How is that a better direction?
This is the issue when people make short sighted emotional arguments without considering the second order effects of what their decisions would cause. It's like the trolley problem.
In 1993, Ukraine wanted to "dismantle only 36 percent of its delivery vehicles and 42 percent of its warheads, leaving the rest under Ukrainian control." Only US promising them more money got them to change the position.
[0] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/ukraine-nuclear-weapo...
Because it looks consistent, it's incredibly close to actual facts and it serves the narrative well.
But yeah, it is false.
First of all, broadly speaking, Budapest memorandum was not broken at a scale people think it was. The memorandum is quite short, go read it and decide for yourself whether it was failed. Bear in mind that the memorandum has no legal consequences, it's not binding at all.
Second, what you have said about the nukes is mostly correct. I have been living in Ukraine since before the independence and up until the war and let me tell you: people in the West have no idea how poor Ukraine was at the time. A wasteland. There was no funds to fuel ambulances in Kiev, let alone maintain the extremely expensive nukes. Nukes have an expiration date, and they would be rendered useless by the time Ukraine scrambled funds to maintain even a single one of them. Leave alone the fact that there was no (extremely expensive and complex) service facilities, no fissile material to maintain the nukes and no ways to procure or produce one.
Third, people in the west have no idea how corrupt Ukraine was (and I hate to say it - is). There is no doubt at all that some of the nukes would be lost.
So, there is no conceivable scenario in which Ukraine gets to keep and maintain those nukes in the nineties.
(I hate to say all of it as I am ukrainian.)
PS: Kasachstan bought some 3 months ago and how the music has shifted. Enjoy your frozzen jail, with nuclear armed neighbors as guard.
Also back in the early 90s spending massive amounts of money you can't afford when your country is in an extremely horrible spot economically just in case you might need it 20 years later doesn't seem politically feasible (i.e. you need to be an authoritarian shithole like one of the countries you mentioned or slightly less authoritarian but consider a much larger neighbouring country to be an existential threat which again.. didn't make much sense in the early 90s)
They had no other choice but to hand over their nukes since the nukes were never theirs to begin with, they belonged to Russia, they had no launch codes which were in Moscow, nor the resources to maintain them, and that's not exactly what the world needed at the time of the USSR breakup in 1991: nukes in then hands of a bankrupt and corrupt nation going through political and economic turmoil of the 90s, guaranteeing them to get "lost" and end up in the hands of warlords.
So giving them up was the correct and only choice. Otherwise they would have been persuaded by force to give them up either through sanctions then military intervention.