Ukraine with nuclear weapons or Ukraine in NATO?

Zelenskyy is clear about Ukraine's need for security, and has point-blank stated that having some nuclear weapons available would be the next best thing to joining NATO. That has certainly created some consternation among Ukraine's allies and enemies alike. I'll turn things over to a blogger who goes by the name The Analyst to break this recent development down for us.

‘HE SHOULD NOT HAVE SAID IT’

That was the reaction that came thick and fast from even some of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters.

They argue that it upset allies and Ukraine is a member of the 1968 Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, which it joined on December 5 1994. However you have to give just 90 days notice to leave the agreement.

One of the biggest concerns is that Zelensky handed Putin a propaganda victory - I don’t think the Kremlin ever reacted so fast to something Zelensky has said.  It clearly rattled Putin’s cage and a torrent of escalation talk spewed forth.

First off he said Russia must redouble its efforts to win the war. How? It’s already flat out at it so those are just words.

Then he added that Russia would never allow Ukraine to possess a nuclear weapon.

Again, how? That’s as hollow as the Americans trying to prevent Iran. Iran knows the Americans can probably do some seriously bad damage to some of its facilities but if it chose to really build the bomb nobody will know until it either tests it - which would be stupid, or has sufficient - maybe twenty or so secreted around the country that they can’t all be destroyed.

The only things stopping Iran are the current Supreme Leader who regards it as un-Islamic (which strictly speaking it is based on the Koran), and the fact that they don’t want to risk what will be a massive and ongoing strike on Iranian facilities.

That is something Russia doesn’t have the capacity to do against Ukraine without resorting to nuclear weapons, which it won’t do, so the conclusion is that Putin actually had the crap scared out of him that Ukraine might be the first of many nations who have realised, that there is only one way to stop a nuclear power getting what it wants - and that’s by being a nuclear power.

The biggest reason the Americans don’t want Iran with a nuclear capability isn’t they might use it on Israel - that’s the last place they probably would because Israel can use theirs on Iran. It’s that the other Middle Eastern states especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, would insist on having one too. They simply wouldn’t trust Iran if they didn’t have what it had.

Zelensky has posed one of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century and dared to speak it out loud.

The fact is that Russia has and continues to use the threat of nuclear weapons. It repeatedly used and is using right now, nuclear coercion to prevent the NATO nations from - three of which have nuclear weapons themselves -  deliveries of various weapons types. These coercive tactics delayed deliveries of key weapons for months and years. Today they are stopping the Americans allowing long range weapon use in Russia itself.

Everyone has seen that the deliberate use of the coercive power of nuclear weapons does have an effect on your enemies even if eventually they overcome their fears. Ukraine has suffered the consequences of this coercion, literally in the destruction of its own people and land. If Ukraine had had even 100 nuclear weapons, Russian would not have invaded with such existential ambitions as occupying the entire country and returning Ukraine to be another subject state of its colonial empire.

This fact that not having nuclear weapons has allowed Ukraine to be a victim of a state that has them - that having them has made Russia in many ways invulnerable to external attack - has not been lost on China and  North Korea. China is increasing its arsenal to have parity with the US and the Koreans to ensure their own dynastic survival.

They’re not the only ones who see national survival as dependent on nuclear weapons. Pakistan fears Indian conventional might so greatly its own possession has guaranteed its safety. India knows that Pakistan would resort to battlefield use of nukes it short order because it would have to. And that would lead to a regional conflagration of terrifying consequences.

So when Zelensky turns to his allies and says he would rather join NATO than follow this path, believe him. He simply wants to be a member of the only effective alliance in the world.

But if we fail Ukraine, if we leave it to potential Russian aggression again - and we know it will come, then he wants the ultimate guarantee it won’t. And that is a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent.

What is so unreasonable about that? Nothing is the answer and we all know it.

What the rest of the nuclear powers don’t want is Ukraine demonstrating the very thing that everyone else knows - only nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantee against another nuclear power attacking you. That’s why Iran really wants one. It’s the chaos of spreading that reality around other parts of the world that’s causing so much angst. 

The only thing that stopped South Korea building nuclear weapons was American guarantees - and recently the repeated surfacing of an SSBN in South Korean waters to show N.Korea it was real.
The demand is out there containing it is hard. 

But that doesn’t make Zelensky wrong and I admire him for having the guts to say it out loud. Finally the consequences of this war are heard in western capitals.

Links to the Telegram posts here and here. The bottom line is that Zelenskyy is only contemplating obtaining nuclear weapons because Western efforts to provide weapons to Ukraine to handle the immediate crisis (the on-going war caused by Russia's invasion) have been middling at best. The best opportunity to cut the war short was in 2022 when the Russian invasion had already turned out to be a spectacular failure. Instead, we've witnessed this war of attrition that itself is not sustainable long-term. 

The truth is that the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine's government voluntarily relinquished its Soviet-era nukes in exchange for security guarantees was not worth the paper it was written on, and we have been reminded for the umpteenth time that whoever is acting as the Kremlin's dictator will say one thing and do something else far more toxic. Given that context, it is understandable that the current Ukrainian government and I suspect subsequent Ukrainian governments will want to have real tangible assurances of security. To Zelenskyy, the best case scenario is joining NATO. If not NATO, then nukes it is. I am sure that prospect doesn't thrill the current Hungarian dictator or the pro-Russian PM in Slovakia, given that they would be bordering a Ukraine with nuclear weapons, and given the rhetoric coming out of Slovakia and Hungary, diplomatic relations between a non-NATO Ukraine and those two countries will likely be fairly icy if not overtly hostile. 

As much as I am against nuclear weapons proliferation, I understand the allure. Attacking a nation with the capacity to strike with nukes is a fool's errand. It does seem to work as a deterrent. There's a reason why the Iranian government would love to have the capacity to produce its own nuclear weapons and why it has long been rumored that Israel has its own nuclear weapons capability (note that with regard to Israel, there is no concrete evidence of nuclear weapons - just suspicions and rumors which should be treated accordingly). The Analyst is correct that South Korea has been willing to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for US protection from North Korea. Read between the lines about what a  second Trump presidency would mean for the stationing of US troops in South Korea, and you can infer that South Korean defense officials are probably thinking of contingency plans for self-defense against an impoverished by nuclear armed North Korea absent US security presence. 

It is naive to think that those nations currently possessing nuclear weapons will voluntarily give them up. It would be great if that happened, but the long-standing regional and international hostilities we've all lived with aren't going to go away any time soon. I was watching 40-year old British film about the consequences of a nuclear war, Threads, recently. It's a difficult film to watch, and let's be thankful that 1980s production values pale in comparison to what would be available today, otherwise many scenes later in the film would be very difficult to view. We don't ever want to experience a scenario in which a full-scale nuclear attack is launched. The consequences would be devastating. Unfortunately we are going to be stuck with the risks for a while, so we'd better get used to it. If we want to prevent Ukraine from joining the nuclear club the choice could not be simpler: get Ukraine into NATO and drag Slovakia's and Hungary's prime ministers kicking and screaming if necessary. That would be one step in the right direction.