re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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Ukraine gave up its entire nuclear arsenal.

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The common narrative is that Ukraine gave up deterrence when agreeing to give up the nuclear arsenal, when in fact they never had operational control of these weapons.

The Russian's had begun removing the most mobile and usable of the weapons (tactical nukes) even before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Of the strategic assets, the ICBM's had a range of 5,000km to 10,000km, having been designed to hit targets in the U.S. Virtually unusable as a deterrent because only the Russian Far East could have been retargeted. The remaining ALCM's on bomber platforms for shorter range delivery could have threatened the Western/European portion of Russia, had not the Russian's disabled their targeting capacity early on in the process.

And a host of other issues... the lack of a nuclear weapons program and the attendant uranium enrichment and plutonium facilities, survivability, etc, etc.

SAGE Journal's Was Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament a Blunder?