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Within hours of a public showdown at the White House between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in February, a Ukrainian banker started a fundraising campaign to buy nuclear weapons. Despite the privations inflicted by the war, Ukrainians donated as much as they could and gathered more than half a million dollars before he declared it was meant in jest and redirected the fund toward the purchase of drones.
Washington has more than a hundred B61 gravity bombs deployed across the continent in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The total U.S. inventory is above 5,000, roughly matching Russia’s arsenal. In comparison, France and Britain, Europe’s only nuclear-armed states, possess a little more than 500 nuclear warheads combined.
Moreover, there are doctrinal challenges. The French nuclear doctrine limits the use of nukes to only if France came under attack. In comparison, Britain has declared that its deterrent extends to European allies, but the British nuclear deterrent itself is dependent on the United States for Trident missiles aboard four Vanguard-class submarines, since the missiles are leased from Lockheed Martin.
oh no worries guys, thats plenty to destroy the planet.
The problem that’s arising now is that all of the major nuclear powers (UK and France aren’t really “major”) are now run by authoritarian regimes. The obvious implication is that there’s a sharply increased risk that they’ll decide to start using nukes to get what they want, and that they’ll all be more or less on the same side.
The rest of the world DOES need to seriously start exploring nuclear arms programs. The complete and total abrogation of the Budapest Memorandum (flagrantly by Russia via invasion; passively by the US and UK for not doing much of anything in response to Russia invading in 2014, and not providing more direct and overt support in 2022) has laid bare that the security agreements therein were worth less than the paper it was signed on.
Our failure to do ANYTHING meaningful to defend Ukraine when they gave up thousands of Soviet nukes in the wake of the fall of the USSR has made it painfully clear that nuclear proliferation is coming back in a big way, by simple virtue of the fact that they are clearly the final word in terms of guaranteeing a country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Russia would absolutely not have invaded Ukraine if one of the possible consequences was “Moscow and St Petersburg get turned to glass”.
Think of the accidents that could happen. If we could only somehow use an international agency to get countries to get rid of nukes…
I can agree that a nuclear arsenal is (or rather, should be) a good deterrent against international aggression, but why does everyone need so many?! I wonder if it has to do with processing i.e. one ‘process’ produces tens or hundreds of warheads worth of material…
Reliability and defense systems, lets say you need 100 warheads for credible deterrence.
Your missiles have a success rate of 80% so no you need 120. The enemy defenses shoot down 50% so now you need 240.
So to guarantee the 100 warhead deterrence you already need 240 warheads, and this number only increases further.
I mean, nominally, they don’t; it’s a legacy of the Cold War. But instead of drawing things down after the USSR fell, Russia held on to thousands and thousands of them, and the US felt it would be irresponsible to allow such a clear imbalance of power with a recent foe… that turned into a current foe. And China, being a neighbor of Russia, and also now a pretty clear adversary of the US, wasn’t about to let themselves get outpaced by strategic rivals either.
There was an opportunity in the 90s to just calm things down a ton, but that came and went.
TL;DR: a sound modern nuclear policy for a reasonably wealthy country is to have a reasonable enough number of weapons deployable via at least two vectors (one as sub-launched, if possible) to serve as a credible and ironclad second-strike force. That is the backstop that’ll keep your borders and sovereignty safe in the long run.