"In 2022, Russia violated that agreement, launching an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’s borders, claiming pieces of its territory."
Wrong! The invasion happened in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea, approximately 5% of Ukraine's land area. (For comparison, Montana is a similar percentage of the continental US.)
The US spent $5 billion to help overthrow Yanukovich, a democratically (as democratic as Ukraine gets) elected leader who was pro-Russian, and drove him from the country. That's why we have the shit show now. Typical Mossadegh style behavior. Reap the wind, sow the whirlwind. We set things in motion for the current status 10 years ago...Change my minf
I believe (without researching to confirm) that the Crimea was only a part of Ukrain because Stalin decided that made it easier to manage. He was not thinking that the Soviet Union was temporary.
The Ukrainians believed it was part of Ukraine in 2014, and that border was internationally recognized.
The really relevant facts here are that NATO, after not expanding since the addition of Spain in 1982 and unified Germany (replacing West Germany) in 1990, added 12 eastern European countries from 1999 to 2009, including 3 former Soviet Socialist Republics, thus committing American soldiers to defending Latvian (for example) soil as if it were their own.
This was total madness on the part of the West, but even so, Ukraine was left out. Deliberately, definitively, left out. The West declined to offer NATO protection to Ukraine.
And the West did absolutely nothing when Russia invaded in 2014. This invasion was not at all a topic of discussion for the US presidential elections in either 2016 or 2020. No one in the US gave a single fuck about Ukraine.
So Russia/Putin waited 8 years and 3 US administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden) to see if the West cared, correctly concluded that the West did not care, then finally moved to seize the rest of Ukraine.
Now, suddenly, we're at war with Eastasia! (That's a reference to Orwell's 1984, just in case anybody doesn't get it.) The US and the West freak out, and declare that we must defend Ukraine!!!
But only kinda sorta, because Russia has, you know, nukes, and might actually use them. (Note: anyone who claims to understand how Putin thinks and yet did NOT predict the 2014 invasion is disqualified from opining on whether or not Putin would use nukes.) So the West did a squishy not-really defense of Ukraine, which led to an essential stalemate, but with massive infrastructure destruction and tremendous loss of life.
Putin is pure evil and deserves 99% of the blame here, but the West's policy from 1999 to 2025 has been completely incoherent and has resulted in the worst possible outcome: massive destruction AND Russia taking over Ukraine in the end.
You can blame Trump if you like, but the West pouring tens of billions of dollars into a lost and unexplained endless war was one reason that he got elected.
Not many people know this (including here in Sweden), but Sweden had a secret nuclear weapons program during the Cold War, started right around the time as the Manhattan Project. By the 1950s, clandestine nuclear testing was possible. And by 1965, Sweden was within 6 months of fielding a nuclear weapon--closer to the bomb, reportedly, than Iran today.
Like other almost-nuclear powers (including South Africa!), Sweden voluntarily wound down its own secret program under influence of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. And it was strongly influenced to do so by the United States and by an implicit guarantee for (nominally) neutral Sweden that the long arm of NATO would save the day against the USSR.
A lot of the pro-nuke arguments in this essay are relevant to not just front-line middle powers like South Korea or Poland, but even a much wider long-list of countries who have reason to fear Russian or Chinese imperialism and revanchism. Why shouldn't they acquire the ultimate insurance now? I'd think that Vietnam and the Philippines would be interested, too, given how much China is throwing her weight around in the (maybe soon to be literally) South China Sea.
And maybe Romania, alongside Poland, would think that weaponizing their civilian nuclear capability as defense against Russian attempts to reconstitute a Neo-USSR makes sense. Lithuania doesn't have nuclear power now, but is planning it, and the temptation for the extremely vulnerable Baltics and its own soft underbelly of a border with Russia's Kaliningrad, in particular. Finland, famously, abandoned its Finlandization for full NATO membership and already have civilian nuclear power. Why not supplement that long and very indefensible border with Russia with some boom-booms?
Maybe. And maybe it is how we all stay alive. Mutually Assured Destruction is a powerful deterrent. If it available to everyone, then we all might think differently about invading other countries.
We'll think differently until the leader of one country stops being rational or overplays their hand. The danger of this possibility increases as more nations gain access to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Most global governance is not great.
This is true. And maybe it will take a nuclear event, or events, to make us realize the error of our ways. But I would rather have every country be in the position to resist bullying than let them get rolled over. As the saying goes, I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.
Vietnam just restarted nuclear power plants construction though - but for nuclear weapons, we never had enough capability to do it: only a small research reactor is in Da Lat, and many nuclear engineers studied in Russia and France were laid off after our cancellation of first nuclear power plants several years ago.
Some Vietnamese academics actually lamented that we could not have nuclear capabilities, and have to depend on great powers' whims, but from that to getting nukes is a pipe dream!
Well, let's look at Pakistan: long ago, back when the technology was still not as mature and Pakistan itself was much poorer, it took about 25 years from inception of research to fielding a nuclear weapon deliverable by rocket-mounted warhead in 1998. But let's remember that it was developing its first civilian nuclear power capability not long before the weapons program started. And Pakistan to this day doesn't even have a very sophisticated indigenous civilian nuclear capability, since its two reactor complexes were built with significant foreign assistance from Canada, France, and China.
Considering Vietnam today is far wealthier than Pakistan in the 1970s (the economy is 5x bigger in real terms) and has many more existing models to work with for a fully-mature technology (both for civilian nuclear power and nuclear weapons), I assume that timeline could be much shorter. Maybe even in 10 years!
The argument for Japan, Poland, South Korea as well as Germany acquiring nuclear weapons to deter Russia and China is cogent when considering the next few decades.
But, what are the long term consequences of these actions when it comes to the potential use of these weapons. If Japan, South Korea, Germany and Poland acquire them, what argument do we make to stop Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Indonesia, Venezuela and others from acquiring their own? The more countries that acquire them the higher the likelihood that they will be used.
When such arguments start getting made by even the moderate or progressive intellectual circles without considering the long term consequences on nuclear weapons use, they increasingly feel like the solution to the Fermi paradox.
The argument for those countries acquiring nuclear weapons, is that can see that alliances with the USA mean nothing and that they have agency. In the event of a war, smaller countries can clearly see the USA will either not defend them or actively side with the aggressor, in order to extort resources. So it's really irrelevant if Americans think it's a bad idea, as noted, those smaller countries have agency too. America wants to move away from alliances and allies, therefore its incumbent on those allies to defend themselves.
What's to stop Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Indonesia, or Venezuela from getting nuclear weapons even if Japan and South Korea don't get them?
Noah makes a good point that the only thing that is effective at stopping proliferation is agreement amongst the most powerful countries to stop it. Right now China and Russia are not incentivized to stop proliferation because the only countries that are newly acquiring weapons are the ones they're aligned with.
What's stopped them in the past is (1) the US nuclear umbrella, (2) concern about becoming a nuclear target, but most of all (3) an extremely carefully-managed US project designed to economically isolate any nation that works towards building these weapons (with obvious exceptions for a few favored allies, because the world is weird like that.) Turkey and Indonesia look at the consequences for Iran and North Korea and don't want that to happen to their economies. (I suspect Venezuela just doesn't have the capability or interest.)
All of those things are much harder to rely on in this new world.
I still remember watching John Kennedy’s address after we’d discovered that the Russians were placing offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. I don’t know how many Americans still remember the terror of the following thirteen days, as we and the rest of the world waited for resolution or Armageddon, but for myself, such articles as these remain an echo of the standard rationale for our arms race with the Soviet Union - MAD (mutually assured destruction).
I’m no naive dreamer, and I fully recognize the hard practical political and military aspects of the nuclear age. I was born exactly five months before the Enola Gay opened her bomb bay doors over Hiroshima. I’m thus a confirmed plank owner in the first generation of human beings to spend our lives in that terrible shadow.
I’m still sometimes at least partially surprised at the sheer breadth of Trump’s brazen lies, and even more so that so many Americans still believe nearly everything that comes out of that mendacious maw.
But that amazement pales beside my incomprehension of the sheer insanity of a race which can at once call itself Homo sapiens and yet continue to toy so stubbornly with bringing about the end of the world.
Any competent military leader will tell you that war creates its own future; that as has often been said, all the fine planning goes out the window when the first shot is fired. Yet we continue to ignore a lesson that has been learned and re-learned thousands of times since we invented war in those hot Mesopotamian wastes so near where Israel and Hamas have recently been continuing that ghastly practice.
At least before the advent of the German V-1, those intent on the mass slaughter of some other group have had time to ponder what at the results might be, even if they ignore the worst possibilities Now some single human being or other may have fifteen minutes or less to make a decision that would affect the entire world in unimaginable ways, and he or she would have to make it before most of the rest of that world even knew the decision was necessary. No human being should be put in that position, let alone by other human beings. To do is utter insanity by any definition I can think of.
I’ve spent pretty much my whole life wondering if the world might end during my lifetime. Indeed, I spent most of teenage years wondering if I’d live to see twenty, so my last sixty years have been a kind of grace period. I would like to think that period will continue when I’m gone. But every addition to the already far too large nuclear club makes that less likely.
The sad truth is that proliferation is happening and will continue to happen, and the more we enter a multi-polar world with aggressive powers, the more incentive there will be for countries to obtain nukes.
I think there might be one chance. But it would entail an ‘incident' big enough to really scare enough people to be effective in stopping this insanity but not destructive enough to radically alter or to end life on earth. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but if it happens, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
Agreed. I believe that a voting base that forgets the cold war or never lived through it is why we've arrived again at American grand strategic failure a la 1930s and mass nuclear proliferation.
> In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and Russia to respect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty.
Ukraine didn't give up its nuclear weapons. It never had any in any meaningful sense.
"The Minister of State for the Armed Forces (Mr. Jeremy Hanley): I am pleased to reassure my hon. Friend that all tactical nuclear weapons have been withdrawn from the Ukraine and, as I said, strategic weapons are not under its control."
Or as the BBC wrote: "Strictly speaking, the missiles belonged to the Soviet Union, not to its newly independent former republics." Just like US nukes that were stored in South Korea didn't belong to South Korea.
Moscow never gave anyone in Ukraine control or launch codes. There is zero evidence Ukraine ever had the technical ability to do anything with the USSR nukes other than use them as paperweights.
And what was the alternative, really? There's a reason why Ukraine accepted something they knew at the time was a worthless piece of paper. Ukraine isn't party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and would never have been added, so they would have been standing against the UN. Moscow probably would have just walked in and taken them back by force -- remember that Yeltsin had already public mused about using nuclear force against Ukraine and that Ukraine said they wanted to devote 3% of GDP to building a military in 1991 but their economy was a shambles and they failed to come anywhere close to that -- and everyone would have looked the other way, including the US who wanted the nukes gone even more than the Russians did. It is pretty clear from reading notes from diplomats at the time that everybody, including Ukraine, knew the agreement was just theatre.
What's theatre is BBC writing that the missiles belong to the Soviet Union after there was no Soviet Union.
More credible sources have consistently held that there was no technical barrier for Ukraine in the medium term for it to wrest control of its strategic nukes.
Of course there were economic impediments.
Regardless of Ukraine taking the easier path, it was a choice. That choice was made easy by the promises made and since broken by the signatories.
The upshot is that the US and UK (and of course Russia) are unreliable, and that no one should make Ukraine's mistake again
We can lament nuclear proliferation, but should recognize that western strategic failure in the face of authoritarian expansionism is to blame.
International law clearly saw Russia as the successor to the USSR as laid out explicitly in "Guidelines on the Recognition of New States in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union"
There's a reason Russia is on the UN Security Council and that nobody had to negotiate a single new treaty with Russia but did have to negotiate them with the newly independent republics.
Yeltin sent a letter to the UN saying that Russia adopted all rights and obligations of the USSR. The Secretary General of the UN forwarded it to every country with a note explaining this was reality, not up for discussion, and every significant member of the UN had already agreed with this approach that Russia had all rights and obligations of the USSR.
I'd like to better understand why Taiwan itself would not be included in this list? I'd be surprised to hear they don't have the capability to do so quickly. My best guess would be that while they would surely try to do so in secret, any solid rumor of a nuclear program could provoke a Chinese invasion, but I am curious what the author's rationale was.
(I am not advocating for Taiwan to do this; just trying to learn.)
I was also very puzzled by its absence. Lack of diplomatic recognition does make the situation different, but I was expecting at least a sentence in here somewhere about why exactly that would put it on the non-nuclear side of the line.
Taiwan has not done so largely out of misplaced cultural assumptions of amity.
It would be tough for Taiwan in a way that it is not for Japan or SK: it only has 2 decent subs until it's new line completes its first late this year.
If China believed that Taiwan was starting a nuclear weapons program, it would start bombing Taiwan tomorrow. So developing nuclear weapons is not a practical option for Taiwan.
"If Ukraine falls, Poland will be next on Russia’s menu — and Russia will have plenty of newly conscripted Ukrainian troops to throw as cannon fodder against Poland."
Nah. Baltics. The Russians have had a thing for the Baltics for a very long time.
The Americans supply and keep the Nuclear Codes for the UK Submarines that supposedly offer the UK some protection from the Russians. Does anyone believe that if Britain is threatened by the Russians during a confrontation over Ukraine, that Trump will pro the codes necessary to protect us against nuclear attack by the Russians. I don’t.
Iran needs them immediately as well. Israel is clearly the most destabilizing, and genocidal, state actor in the world today, and must be stopped. The only way to do that is with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Hell, if I had President Musk's cache of filthy lucre, I'd buy them a bunch of nukes myself. While I was at it, I'd probably buy some for Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland as well. It's a MAD world!
Your first paragraph is completely unintelligible.
You second paragraph makes no sense. The "boxing in of Iran proxies" means only that, for the moment, the Israelis get to pursue their campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank with fewer military constraints. But, until it stops, that campaign will remain the most destabilizing force in the region and the world for the foreseeable future.
The question of whether Iran's obtaining nukes will stop that campaign is one that can only answered by seeing what happens if it gets them. MAD seems to have prevented the Russians from simply annihilating Ukraine. I suspect that Iranian nukes would help keep Israel from annihilating Gaza and the West Bank. Like I said, if I could afford to conduct the experiment that might falsify my hypothesis, I'd do it faster than you can say "Judeofascism."
Noah, if you have not read Paul Bracken's The Second Nuclear Age -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13538345 -- you absolutely should. Your analysis dovetails with his very well, but he has 40 years of experience running DoD and CIA war games. He spends a lot of the book talking about how nuclear weapons are used without ever being launched, which sounds weird, but I think you'll understand. N Korea is your best example of that.
The only country I would add to your list is Taiwan. I believe the United States should give Taiwan several nuclear weapons and the launch codes to use them. (Essentially the same thing we did for Israel way back when.) You and N.S. Lyons have convinced me that we have a near existential need in a free Taiwan (we should also work to change that via industrial policy, but for now, it's true) but we currently lack the ability or political will to defend them. Nuclear weapons would make a Chinese invasion incredibly costly for China and likely so destructive to Taiwan that it wouldn't be worth holding. That's MAD. But it works.
I agree with you that Taiwan should get nukes. But they don't need us to give them any. They were closed to getting them in the late 1960's and they stopped because we, (the US) pressured them. Materially they have everything they need to make them plus the know how.
Taiwan can't build them faster than China can bomb them into rubble at the first sign of a nuclear program. The only way they could get nuclear weapons is if another country gave them some working ones in secret.
I agree with the thesis of this article, and indeed would go further - I think Taiwan needs nuclear weapons too (though I'm not optimistic about that happenning; the Taiwanese leadership realized this in the 1970s and '80s and then got cowed out of it by the Reagan Administration.)
Last year I wrote an article on my own substack called "The Poland Paradox: How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe."
My thesis was that whenever a small country neglects its own military and fails to make alliances with nearby countries, and relies instead on a mutual protection pact with a Faraway great power, it ends up getting treated like Poland in 1939 - i.e. when TWO countries invaded it, Britain declared war on only ONE of them, and Poland ended the war as a client state of the other (besides having more of its population killed in WWII than any other country.) The problem - whether in the case of Poland 1939 or Ukraine 2022 or Taiwan 20?? - is that the faraway ally doesn't have as strong of an interest in protecting the small country as a more nearby ally would, and so will rethink its commitments if push comes to shove. (And aggressor nations know this, which makes them more likely to call their rivals bluffs.)
If Poland had decided to take its own defense more seriously after the Cold War ended, then the present war probably would have never happened, since Russia would know that Poland + Ukraine are strong enough to repel the invasion together and have a mutual interest in doing so. As it turned out, though, Poland (like the rest of Europe) neglected its army and relied on NATO and the United States, and when the war came - despite their loud gestures of support and their fear that if Ukraine falls Poland would be next - the Poles proved too timid to join the war without the United States doing likewise... and the US (under Obama and Biden, not Trump!) decided (quite predictably) that it's interests in Eastern Europe weren't big enough to justify a war.
Hopefully, a lot of countries in Europe and the West Pacific will wake up to what's happening before it's too late.
It would take Japan and South Korea until Monday to develop nuclear warheads. They already have a delivery system built, although it's used to deliver Amazon packages so they'll have to pay a 30% fee per detonation.
Poland won't have warhead capability until the first week in March. But they can use the missiles they are building to defend Ukraine with some duct tape for compatibility.
"In 2022, Russia violated that agreement, launching an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’s borders, claiming pieces of its territory."
Wrong! The invasion happened in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea, approximately 5% of Ukraine's land area. (For comparison, Montana is a similar percentage of the continental US.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
It is very important to get this history right. The complete non-reaction of the West to the 2014 invasion is what set up its escalation in 2022.
OK, true.
The US spent $5 billion to help overthrow Yanukovich, a democratically (as democratic as Ukraine gets) elected leader who was pro-Russian, and drove him from the country. That's why we have the shit show now. Typical Mossadegh style behavior. Reap the wind, sow the whirlwind. We set things in motion for the current status 10 years ago...Change my minf
I believe (without researching to confirm) that the Crimea was only a part of Ukrain because Stalin decided that made it easier to manage. He was not thinking that the Soviet Union was temporary.
The Ukrainians believed it was part of Ukraine in 2014, and that border was internationally recognized.
The really relevant facts here are that NATO, after not expanding since the addition of Spain in 1982 and unified Germany (replacing West Germany) in 1990, added 12 eastern European countries from 1999 to 2009, including 3 former Soviet Socialist Republics, thus committing American soldiers to defending Latvian (for example) soil as if it were their own.
This was total madness on the part of the West, but even so, Ukraine was left out. Deliberately, definitively, left out. The West declined to offer NATO protection to Ukraine.
And the West did absolutely nothing when Russia invaded in 2014. This invasion was not at all a topic of discussion for the US presidential elections in either 2016 or 2020. No one in the US gave a single fuck about Ukraine.
So Russia/Putin waited 8 years and 3 US administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden) to see if the West cared, correctly concluded that the West did not care, then finally moved to seize the rest of Ukraine.
Now, suddenly, we're at war with Eastasia! (That's a reference to Orwell's 1984, just in case anybody doesn't get it.) The US and the West freak out, and declare that we must defend Ukraine!!!
But only kinda sorta, because Russia has, you know, nukes, and might actually use them. (Note: anyone who claims to understand how Putin thinks and yet did NOT predict the 2014 invasion is disqualified from opining on whether or not Putin would use nukes.) So the West did a squishy not-really defense of Ukraine, which led to an essential stalemate, but with massive infrastructure destruction and tremendous loss of life.
Putin is pure evil and deserves 99% of the blame here, but the West's policy from 1999 to 2025 has been completely incoherent and has resulted in the worst possible outcome: massive destruction AND Russia taking over Ukraine in the end.
You can blame Trump if you like, but the West pouring tens of billions of dollars into a lost and unexplained endless war was one reason that he got elected.
Not many people know this (including here in Sweden), but Sweden had a secret nuclear weapons program during the Cold War, started right around the time as the Manhattan Project. By the 1950s, clandestine nuclear testing was possible. And by 1965, Sweden was within 6 months of fielding a nuclear weapon--closer to the bomb, reportedly, than Iran today.
Like other almost-nuclear powers (including South Africa!), Sweden voluntarily wound down its own secret program under influence of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. And it was strongly influenced to do so by the United States and by an implicit guarantee for (nominally) neutral Sweden that the long arm of NATO would save the day against the USSR.
A lot of the pro-nuke arguments in this essay are relevant to not just front-line middle powers like South Korea or Poland, but even a much wider long-list of countries who have reason to fear Russian or Chinese imperialism and revanchism. Why shouldn't they acquire the ultimate insurance now? I'd think that Vietnam and the Philippines would be interested, too, given how much China is throwing her weight around in the (maybe soon to be literally) South China Sea.
And maybe Romania, alongside Poland, would think that weaponizing their civilian nuclear capability as defense against Russian attempts to reconstitute a Neo-USSR makes sense. Lithuania doesn't have nuclear power now, but is planning it, and the temptation for the extremely vulnerable Baltics and its own soft underbelly of a border with Russia's Kaliningrad, in particular. Finland, famously, abandoned its Finlandization for full NATO membership and already have civilian nuclear power. Why not supplement that long and very indefensible border with Russia with some boom-booms?
On the one hand, you might be right that this will happen and even that it's necessary. On the other hand, this is how we all die.
Maybe. And maybe it is how we all stay alive. Mutually Assured Destruction is a powerful deterrent. If it available to everyone, then we all might think differently about invading other countries.
We'll think differently until the leader of one country stops being rational or overplays their hand. The danger of this possibility increases as more nations gain access to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Most global governance is not great.
This is true. And maybe it will take a nuclear event, or events, to make us realize the error of our ways. But I would rather have every country be in the position to resist bullying than let them get rolled over. As the saying goes, I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.
I don't even disagree with you, but I'd sure rather live in the world where a few strong nuclear powers did the right thing.
I would as well. Unfortunately we don’t live in that world right now.
Channeling Oprah:
"You get a nuke! And you get a nuke! And you get a nuke! You all get a nuke!"
Vietnam just restarted nuclear power plants construction though - but for nuclear weapons, we never had enough capability to do it: only a small research reactor is in Da Lat, and many nuclear engineers studied in Russia and France were laid off after our cancellation of first nuclear power plants several years ago.
Some Vietnamese academics actually lamented that we could not have nuclear capabilities, and have to depend on great powers' whims, but from that to getting nukes is a pipe dream!
Well, let's look at Pakistan: long ago, back when the technology was still not as mature and Pakistan itself was much poorer, it took about 25 years from inception of research to fielding a nuclear weapon deliverable by rocket-mounted warhead in 1998. But let's remember that it was developing its first civilian nuclear power capability not long before the weapons program started. And Pakistan to this day doesn't even have a very sophisticated indigenous civilian nuclear capability, since its two reactor complexes were built with significant foreign assistance from Canada, France, and China.
Considering Vietnam today is far wealthier than Pakistan in the 1970s (the economy is 5x bigger in real terms) and has many more existing models to work with for a fully-mature technology (both for civilian nuclear power and nuclear weapons), I assume that timeline could be much shorter. Maybe even in 10 years!
The argument for Japan, Poland, South Korea as well as Germany acquiring nuclear weapons to deter Russia and China is cogent when considering the next few decades.
But, what are the long term consequences of these actions when it comes to the potential use of these weapons. If Japan, South Korea, Germany and Poland acquire them, what argument do we make to stop Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Indonesia, Venezuela and others from acquiring their own? The more countries that acquire them the higher the likelihood that they will be used.
When such arguments start getting made by even the moderate or progressive intellectual circles without considering the long term consequences on nuclear weapons use, they increasingly feel like the solution to the Fermi paradox.
The argument for those countries acquiring nuclear weapons, is that can see that alliances with the USA mean nothing and that they have agency. In the event of a war, smaller countries can clearly see the USA will either not defend them or actively side with the aggressor, in order to extort resources. So it's really irrelevant if Americans think it's a bad idea, as noted, those smaller countries have agency too. America wants to move away from alliances and allies, therefore its incumbent on those allies to defend themselves.
What's to stop Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Indonesia, or Venezuela from getting nuclear weapons even if Japan and South Korea don't get them?
Noah makes a good point that the only thing that is effective at stopping proliferation is agreement amongst the most powerful countries to stop it. Right now China and Russia are not incentivized to stop proliferation because the only countries that are newly acquiring weapons are the ones they're aligned with.
What's stopped them in the past is (1) the US nuclear umbrella, (2) concern about becoming a nuclear target, but most of all (3) an extremely carefully-managed US project designed to economically isolate any nation that works towards building these weapons (with obvious exceptions for a few favored allies, because the world is weird like that.) Turkey and Indonesia look at the consequences for Iran and North Korea and don't want that to happen to their economies. (I suspect Venezuela just doesn't have the capability or interest.)
All of those things are much harder to rely on in this new world.
We should give MBS a nuclear weapon and keep it in the Kaabah. Millions can see it every year during the Hajj.
I still remember watching John Kennedy’s address after we’d discovered that the Russians were placing offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. I don’t know how many Americans still remember the terror of the following thirteen days, as we and the rest of the world waited for resolution or Armageddon, but for myself, such articles as these remain an echo of the standard rationale for our arms race with the Soviet Union - MAD (mutually assured destruction).
I’m no naive dreamer, and I fully recognize the hard practical political and military aspects of the nuclear age. I was born exactly five months before the Enola Gay opened her bomb bay doors over Hiroshima. I’m thus a confirmed plank owner in the first generation of human beings to spend our lives in that terrible shadow.
I’m still sometimes at least partially surprised at the sheer breadth of Trump’s brazen lies, and even more so that so many Americans still believe nearly everything that comes out of that mendacious maw.
But that amazement pales beside my incomprehension of the sheer insanity of a race which can at once call itself Homo sapiens and yet continue to toy so stubbornly with bringing about the end of the world.
Any competent military leader will tell you that war creates its own future; that as has often been said, all the fine planning goes out the window when the first shot is fired. Yet we continue to ignore a lesson that has been learned and re-learned thousands of times since we invented war in those hot Mesopotamian wastes so near where Israel and Hamas have recently been continuing that ghastly practice.
At least before the advent of the German V-1, those intent on the mass slaughter of some other group have had time to ponder what at the results might be, even if they ignore the worst possibilities Now some single human being or other may have fifteen minutes or less to make a decision that would affect the entire world in unimaginable ways, and he or she would have to make it before most of the rest of that world even knew the decision was necessary. No human being should be put in that position, let alone by other human beings. To do is utter insanity by any definition I can think of.
I’ve spent pretty much my whole life wondering if the world might end during my lifetime. Indeed, I spent most of teenage years wondering if I’d live to see twenty, so my last sixty years have been a kind of grace period. I would like to think that period will continue when I’m gone. But every addition to the already far too large nuclear club makes that less likely.
The sad truth is that proliferation is happening and will continue to happen, and the more we enter a multi-polar world with aggressive powers, the more incentive there will be for countries to obtain nukes.
I think there might be one chance. But it would entail an ‘incident' big enough to really scare enough people to be effective in stopping this insanity but not destructive enough to radically alter or to end life on earth. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but if it happens, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
Agreed. I believe that a voting base that forgets the cold war or never lived through it is why we've arrived again at American grand strategic failure a la 1930s and mass nuclear proliferation.
Why not Taiwan? They should build the nukes and then deny like Isreal.
Who said they haven't done so already?
> In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and Russia to respect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty.
Ukraine didn't give up its nuclear weapons. It never had any in any meaningful sense.
"The Minister of State for the Armed Forces (Mr. Jeremy Hanley): I am pleased to reassure my hon. Friend that all tactical nuclear weapons have been withdrawn from the Ukraine and, as I said, strategic weapons are not under its control."
Or as the BBC wrote: "Strictly speaking, the missiles belonged to the Soviet Union, not to its newly independent former republics." Just like US nukes that were stored in South Korea didn't belong to South Korea.
Moscow never gave anyone in Ukraine control or launch codes. There is zero evidence Ukraine ever had the technical ability to do anything with the USSR nukes other than use them as paperweights.
And what was the alternative, really? There's a reason why Ukraine accepted something they knew at the time was a worthless piece of paper. Ukraine isn't party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and would never have been added, so they would have been standing against the UN. Moscow probably would have just walked in and taken them back by force -- remember that Yeltsin had already public mused about using nuclear force against Ukraine and that Ukraine said they wanted to devote 3% of GDP to building a military in 1991 but their economy was a shambles and they failed to come anywhere close to that -- and everyone would have looked the other way, including the US who wanted the nukes gone even more than the Russians did. It is pretty clear from reading notes from diplomats at the time that everybody, including Ukraine, knew the agreement was just theatre.
What's theatre is BBC writing that the missiles belong to the Soviet Union after there was no Soviet Union.
More credible sources have consistently held that there was no technical barrier for Ukraine in the medium term for it to wrest control of its strategic nukes.
Of course there were economic impediments.
Regardless of Ukraine taking the easier path, it was a choice. That choice was made easy by the promises made and since broken by the signatories.
The upshot is that the US and UK (and of course Russia) are unreliable, and that no one should make Ukraine's mistake again
We can lament nuclear proliferation, but should recognize that western strategic failure in the face of authoritarian expansionism is to blame.
International law clearly saw Russia as the successor to the USSR as laid out explicitly in "Guidelines on the Recognition of New States in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union"
There's a reason Russia is on the UN Security Council and that nobody had to negotiate a single new treaty with Russia but did have to negotiate them with the newly independent republics.
Yeltin sent a letter to the UN saying that Russia adopted all rights and obligations of the USSR. The Secretary General of the UN forwarded it to every country with a note explaining this was reality, not up for discussion, and every significant member of the UN had already agreed with this approach that Russia had all rights and obligations of the USSR.
I'd like to better understand why Taiwan itself would not be included in this list? I'd be surprised to hear they don't have the capability to do so quickly. My best guess would be that while they would surely try to do so in secret, any solid rumor of a nuclear program could provoke a Chinese invasion, but I am curious what the author's rationale was.
(I am not advocating for Taiwan to do this; just trying to learn.)
I was also very puzzled by its absence. Lack of diplomatic recognition does make the situation different, but I was expecting at least a sentence in here somewhere about why exactly that would put it on the non-nuclear side of the line.
Taiwan has not done so largely out of misplaced cultural assumptions of amity.
It would be tough for Taiwan in a way that it is not for Japan or SK: it only has 2 decent subs until it's new line completes its first late this year.
If China believed that Taiwan was starting a nuclear weapons program, it would start bombing Taiwan tomorrow. So developing nuclear weapons is not a practical option for Taiwan.
"If Ukraine falls, Poland will be next on Russia’s menu — and Russia will have plenty of newly conscripted Ukrainian troops to throw as cannon fodder against Poland."
Nah. Baltics. The Russians have had a thing for the Baltics for a very long time.
Russia is in no shape to take on Poland at the moment. However, using the Ukrainians as fodder is likely enough to contemplate the Baltics.
The Americans supply and keep the Nuclear Codes for the UK Submarines that supposedly offer the UK some protection from the Russians. Does anyone believe that if Britain is threatened by the Russians during a confrontation over Ukraine, that Trump will pro the codes necessary to protect us against nuclear attack by the Russians. I don’t.
That arrangement never made sense. Now it just seems comically stupid.
To be clear, the 'it' I'm referring to is the conspiracy theory, not the (inaccurate) arrangement.
That is, the US does not control the UK's Trident-based nukes.
Sadly, you might have to add Canada, Greenland, and Panama to your list.
Iran needs them immediately as well. Israel is clearly the most destabilizing, and genocidal, state actor in the world today, and must be stopped. The only way to do that is with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Hell, if I had President Musk's cache of filthy lucre, I'd buy them a bunch of nukes myself. While I was at it, I'd probably buy some for Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland as well. It's a MAD world!
Israel doesn't have a nuclear arsenal it denies having so it can use them in a sneak attack. It used them to complicate attacking Israel.
As for destabilizing, it's managed to do the opposite more recently. Every Iranian proxy that it can box up adds stability for the region.
It's ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories, however, are quite destabilizing. But Iran getting nukes will not stop that.
Your first paragraph is completely unintelligible.
You second paragraph makes no sense. The "boxing in of Iran proxies" means only that, for the moment, the Israelis get to pursue their campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank with fewer military constraints. But, until it stops, that campaign will remain the most destabilizing force in the region and the world for the foreseeable future.
The question of whether Iran's obtaining nukes will stop that campaign is one that can only answered by seeing what happens if it gets them. MAD seems to have prevented the Russians from simply annihilating Ukraine. I suspect that Iranian nukes would help keep Israel from annihilating Gaza and the West Bank. Like I said, if I could afford to conduct the experiment that might falsify my hypothesis, I'd do it faster than you can say "Judeofascism."
Time for the Criterion Channel to put Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" on a 24 hour continuous loop!!!
Noah, if you have not read Paul Bracken's The Second Nuclear Age -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13538345 -- you absolutely should. Your analysis dovetails with his very well, but he has 40 years of experience running DoD and CIA war games. He spends a lot of the book talking about how nuclear weapons are used without ever being launched, which sounds weird, but I think you'll understand. N Korea is your best example of that.
The only country I would add to your list is Taiwan. I believe the United States should give Taiwan several nuclear weapons and the launch codes to use them. (Essentially the same thing we did for Israel way back when.) You and N.S. Lyons have convinced me that we have a near existential need in a free Taiwan (we should also work to change that via industrial policy, but for now, it's true) but we currently lack the ability or political will to defend them. Nuclear weapons would make a Chinese invasion incredibly costly for China and likely so destructive to Taiwan that it wouldn't be worth holding. That's MAD. But it works.
I agree with you that Taiwan should get nukes. But they don't need us to give them any. They were closed to getting them in the late 1960's and they stopped because we, (the US) pressured them. Materially they have everything they need to make them plus the know how.
Add Taiwan to the list that needs nuclear weapons
Taiwan can't build them faster than China can bomb them into rubble at the first sign of a nuclear program. The only way they could get nuclear weapons is if another country gave them some working ones in secret.
I agree with the thesis of this article, and indeed would go further - I think Taiwan needs nuclear weapons too (though I'm not optimistic about that happenning; the Taiwanese leadership realized this in the 1970s and '80s and then got cowed out of it by the Reagan Administration.)
Last year I wrote an article on my own substack called "The Poland Paradox: How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe."
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/the-poland-paradox
My thesis was that whenever a small country neglects its own military and fails to make alliances with nearby countries, and relies instead on a mutual protection pact with a Faraway great power, it ends up getting treated like Poland in 1939 - i.e. when TWO countries invaded it, Britain declared war on only ONE of them, and Poland ended the war as a client state of the other (besides having more of its population killed in WWII than any other country.) The problem - whether in the case of Poland 1939 or Ukraine 2022 or Taiwan 20?? - is that the faraway ally doesn't have as strong of an interest in protecting the small country as a more nearby ally would, and so will rethink its commitments if push comes to shove. (And aggressor nations know this, which makes them more likely to call their rivals bluffs.)
If Poland had decided to take its own defense more seriously after the Cold War ended, then the present war probably would have never happened, since Russia would know that Poland + Ukraine are strong enough to repel the invasion together and have a mutual interest in doing so. As it turned out, though, Poland (like the rest of Europe) neglected its army and relied on NATO and the United States, and when the war came - despite their loud gestures of support and their fear that if Ukraine falls Poland would be next - the Poles proved too timid to join the war without the United States doing likewise... and the US (under Obama and Biden, not Trump!) decided (quite predictably) that it's interests in Eastern Europe weren't big enough to justify a war.
Hopefully, a lot of countries in Europe and the West Pacific will wake up to what's happening before it's too late.
It would take Japan and South Korea until Monday to develop nuclear warheads. They already have a delivery system built, although it's used to deliver Amazon packages so they'll have to pay a 30% fee per detonation.
Poland won't have warhead capability until the first week in March. But they can use the missiles they are building to defend Ukraine with some duct tape for compatibility.
</snark>