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Mats Andersson
Common or Garden Armchair HistorianFeb 21

If WW3 erupts, how likely is it for nuclear weapons to be used?
Originally Answered: Will there now be a nuclear war?
Well…

Back in 1992 or something, there was this treaty. Ukraine gave up all the old Soviet nukes that had been based on their territory. In exchange, they got guarantees that Russia would never lay claim to as much as a square foot of their territory, and NATO said that they’d guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

It seems Russia is now in stark violation of that treaty.

And this is a moment when I suggest that Putin asks himself whether he’s absolutely 100% positively sure that Ukraine returned the exact number of nukes they were reported as having, and that all of them were actually in working order and not, as it were, Potemkin villages, looking very much like nukes but turning out, upon closer inspection, to have had their innards removed and possibly placed in some other cover, and that none of them e.g. had got a novel circuit installed that could trigger the nuke by remote control from afar, such as, say.

In 1994, South African television came out with a brilliant mini-series on nuclear terrorism, It had the title Snitch. During the Apartheid regime, South Africa built 6 nuclear warheads. These warheads were surrendered to The International Atomic Energy Commission. In this program, a seventh nuclear warhead was built. It was hidden by unethical scientists. A wealthy white businessman buys the warhead. He hides it in a parking garage in downtown Johannesburg. It is being detonated in revenge for the rise of a black majority government. The weapon is stopped from detonating seconds before it would explode.

If a nuclear weapon went off in Ukraine, Russians would assume that it was a US weapon. It would take some fast moves to calm them down before they started launching nuclear weapons.