This was around the same time of the sinking of MS Estonia -- hold your downvotes -- which has been shown, through inspection of the cargo and shipping logs with the Estonian authorities, to have been transporting Soviet military vehicles carrying military materials.
I'm wondering if the efforts here to remove nuclear material are somehow related, and if the story in this article is 100% true to the facts. At least I find it strange that Russia would happily see the material handed off like that, and I think it's more likely that all of this happened behind the back of Russia.
"I think it's more likely that all of this happened behind the back of Russia."
My knowledge of the event is solely based on the article. but it does specifically mention that the us wanted and asked russia to take the material but russia did not want it.
I know that at this time the us was buying a lot of fissibles from russia as well. I think the theory was that 1. it would inject money into russia which was broke and 2 it would remove the fissables from ending up on the open market. win-win.
Honestly I would love to read a good in depth history of the breakup of the soviet-union. I don't really understand what happened at all.
Collapse, The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok is an excellent political and economic history of the end of the Soviet Union. It isn't long on technical details of the kind the posted article refers to, but covers the personalities, goals, strategies in the political and economic areas very thoroughly (and is unsparing of both the leadership and actors in the former Soviet Union, the Eastern European nations, and the West).
> At least I find it strange that Russia would happily see the material handed off like that, and I think it's more likely that all of this happened behind the back of Russia.
Why would you be surprised? Russia in the 90s was facing far more pressing problems than military equipment and even nuclear material. I remember reading that we actually paid russia and former soviet nations to keep their nuclear materials secure since much of the former soviet union was in a state of economic collapse in the 90s.
In 1994 Russia was a complete mess and it did not even have a functioning secret service (KGB vanished into thin air and FSB was not created yet). Even if it wanted to interfere it couldn't. It spent time surrendering to separatists in Khasavurt.
The more interesting question than the 600 kilograms of Uranium is why Russia did not have a KGB-descendant and where all of the materials collected by the central Soviet KGB went.
As it name implies, it started with counter-intelligence. And the fun thing is, it was not created by "the same people who ran Soviet KGB", but by the Ukrainian intelligence officer who previously converted KGB of Ukrainian SSR to SNBU (Ukraine's secret service).
The conversion of Ukraine KGB to SNBU and later to SBU was straightforward and happened on the spot, but the creation of FSK/FSB was happening much later, in multiple stages and they did seem to inherit only minor pieces of KGB.
Have you read the article? It explicitly claims that 14 of the 15 top Lubyanka officers ceased working with secret services and exited the field. So it was new people with different background who got ahold of these offices after a long 1991-1995 leave.
Maybe they did rehire some of rank-and-file agents. Eventually.
No, I don't have time for conspiracist crap: there's way too much of it and mental health is finite resource. The event were contemporary to me and I still have a sound memory.
Do you really think KGB had 15 operatives? You seriously have no idea what you're talking about. Cheka has never lost the continuity, that's the major problem of Russia right now.
It did not cease to exist just because a few apparatchiks were shuffled.
Bortnikov has started his career in KGB, continued through FSK and is now the head og FSB. Perfect continuity.
Patrushev, the previous head of FSB before getting appointed to the Security Council also started as a KGB officer, continued in FSK until it was reformed into FSB.
Thousands upon thousands of lower ranks also continued working in the same organization, same offices, park on the same lots and refer to themselves as Chekists. To this day.
I remember reading a chapter about the Russian internal security forces between the fall of the Soviet Union and 2005 and it kind of made my head spin.
In a nutshell—the KGB was dissolved into like 3 organizations and over the next few years it was re-consolidated into the FSB, albeit with more control from the president (Putin)
> I think it's more likely that all of this happened behind the back of Russia.
I remember the events in the article (denuclearization of Ukraine,and other; Kazakhstan’s radioactive being sold to US) as they appeared in the contemporaneous news. Setting things up as described in the article may have been low key but in the end the process was public.
I wonder what it sold for, besides the trinkets mentioned at the end. If they had hodled they could clear maybe a trillion on the open market today (which consists of sovereign states).
Highly enriched U-235 would also be a sound basis for a commodity-backed hard currency, though not quite as good as the US Dollar and the Ruble which are backed by Pu-239.
Nuclear bomb construction material has no open market, it's only held by nuclear powers who work hard to prevent anyone else from possessing it (see the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) - that's the big stick, resulting in North Korea tier sanctions. The trinkets were the carrot.
Kazakhstan made a nuanced calculation of the risk of holding the enriched Uranium, concluded it wasn't worth it.
Amusing related fact of the day, I heard the french nuclear authority transports some of the radioactive uranium in retail pressure cookers. Apparently it's good enough the stop those radiations, they need the pressure release valve, and is much cheaper than to build something custom with very little benefits.
Crazy to think just how much weapons grade material the Soviet Union and US produced during the Cold War, obviously so much that 600kg wasn't worth the effort for Russia to care about atleast.
Insane. 600 kg of Uranium fits in 1.11 cubic-ft or 0.03 cubic-m. I suppose it is compartmentalized in Type-A rad-shielded containers [1] which takes up most of the weight and space.
Please don't try to store 600kg of U238 in a 1.11 cubic-ft container. That's just asking for it to go pop. Fissile material like that needs to be spread out, to prevent any one lump becoming supercritical. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_criticality_safety
No one is suggesting to put it in a small box and throwing it in the back of the airplane. It was to ascertain the readers with a mental picture of how much snuff we're dealing with here. Furthermore, it probably won't go pop, most likely fissile out into a dusty neutronic poof, not worth reporting to higher ups for obvious reasons. For a respectable, mushroom-cloud-worthy yield, you need to jam it in a rather serious reinforcement of Tungsten outer shell to make a weak gun-type bomb. It would still be unimpressive (thermo guys are gonna laugh at you), but hell of a lot better than stuffing it unintentionally in a small box. Safety is only important if there are further plans for survival, so it is sort of a moot point in this radioactive extravaganza. If you do happen to lose the material, be sure to have access to Tungsten as it is almost the same density (a tad bit higher than U238) and no one is going to notice it until we need to use it in the next war.
Agreed, pop is probably the wrong word. But if the demon core incidents are anything to go by [0], then I can well imaging an unsuspecting worker putting one more block of U238 onto a stack, and feeling a sudden wave of heat and seeing a flash of blue light. And then if they don't have the ability to shove the pile over into a more favourable geometry, seeing the whole pile start to melt into a puddle (which would thankfully also have a more favourable geometry). And then dying of acute radiation syndrome a week later.
(Seriously, kids, don't try this at home.)
Extreme heat will moderate the reaction to some extent, because the expansion of the metal means it is further apart and therefore has lower reactivity, however the temperature at which it stabilises could well be above the melting point of Uranium.
I would think it'd do a bit more than pop. They didn't spread it out over a bunch of trucks and three planes for nothing. Most of the weight is going to be secure containers, not the uranium itself.
It doesn't say what was done with the nuke warheads. Maybe they too were flown to the US, even before the U-235?
At the end it mentions "tons of plutonium", presumably subsequently exported, and biological warfare materiel. We know the Soviets had literally tons of smallpox dust packaged so they could easily infect a whole city.
We must wonder what happened in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
According to ([1]), the nuke warheads were safely transferred to Russia:
"Kazakhstan formerly had 1,410 Soviet strategic nuclear warheads placed on its territory and an undisclosed number of tactical nuclear weapons.
...
Kazakhstan transferred all of its Soviet-era nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation by April 1995."
After seeing what happened to Libya when they gave up their nuclear ambitions, and what happened to Ukraine when they gave up their nuclear ambitions, how can anything think that the Iranians would give up their nuclear ambitions?
I live in the state most threatened by a nuclear Iran. But Iran has watched its neighbour to the west be invaded by NATO forces, Iran has watched its neighbour to the east be invaded by NATO forces, and has seen how NATO cowers in front of Russia at the hint of nuclear confrontation. If I were in their shoes, I would not give up the nation's only proven viable deterrent.
It's entirely understandable that Iran fears a US or NATO attack, but I also think it's incredibly stupid for so many people in the US to consider such an attack. For one thing, the current situation of Iran is largely the result of the US/UK overthrow of their democratic government in 1953. This has only caused grief and problems. The attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan didn't really accomplish much either. The US should stop trying to solve problems through war, because it's pretty clear that doesn't work. Use soft power instead; much more effective.
> The attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan didn't really accomplish much either
The 1991 attack on Iraq achieved quite a lot with regard to both terminating the brief invasion of Saudi Arabia and the less brief and more total one of Kuwait and ending Iraq’s active WMD programs and disarming them of their existing WMD.
(The 2003 attack achieved less, largely because the things it was supposedly aimed at achieving had in fact been achieved in 1991.)
The 2003 invasions succeeded in transferring $5T from US taxpayers to a much, much smaller number of US non-taxpayers. Any objective in Iraq was just cover.
Soft power in Russia would have been something along the lines of a Marshall Plan starting from the dissolution of the USSR, and could well have worked.
You remember the Euros. They're constantly telling anyone who will listen that they (the Euros) have the world's largest economy (which is true by some measures, but seems to be irrelevant outside of the EU) and that soft power is more important, decisive even, in a modern world.
And yet, Euros don't seem to be willing to actually use soft power, at least not when they're paying.
Of course, I probably got this wrong, which is to be expected because I'm an American.
What's the reason this time (there's always an excuse):
[1] The US stopped Euros from using soft-power.
[2] The US kept said soft-power from working.
[3] The US wouldn't pay its share.
Yes, the good cop receives the results in good-cop/bad-cop, but that doesn't imply that the bad-cop was irrelevant.
This is something of a non sequitur. Yes, Europe would have been just as important as the US in this scenario. Your comment seems to assume that I am blaming the Americans solely; of course not—this is the West’s mistake.
> And yet, Euros don't seem to be willing to actually use soft power, at least not when they're paying.
Well we did pay—just not in Russia, which was a bit stupid of us. The Germans paid to reintegrate the DDR, and we paid generally to expand the EU to its present borders with substantial investment through Union institutions.
This doesn’t always work (e.g. in Hungary) but it’s been surprisingly successful.
> Of course, I probably got this wrong, which is to be expected because I'm an American.
It’s a bit ridiculous to comment so confidently on a topic on which you admit you are ignorant.
As for the question of what the ‘excuse’ is, I’m, again, not Major, Chirac, or Kohl; I feel no need to defend this European failure. We didn’t really need the Americans, although you have lots of money so that would hardly hurt. We should have done it ourselves.
You was unclear. I ignored any hint of US blaming.
Instead, I put this all on the Euros. (BTW - West Germany doesn't get any credit for re-integrating the DDR - you're expected to take care of your own.)
The fall of the Soviet Union was a perfect opportunity for the Euros to show the US how it's done. It's in their backyard, they tell the US that they know how to deal with the USSR/Russia, and they claim to have the resources.
If what the Euros have been saying for years is true, there was no reason to have any US involvement in this project.
And yet you want me to accept that this is "the West's fault."
I do apologize for the Americanism - I wasn't actually admitting ignorance. Instead, I was pointing out that the Euros have made more than their share of screwups yet somehow always blame the US.
I’m not really sure what the point of your comment is then. At best you show that not properly trying soft power was only the EU’s fault. All right—my initial point is that it’s a bit silly to dismiss soft power if it wasn’t tried properly. But that point is also wrong, since it seems predicated on US policymakers getting off the hook because they read some possibly inextant EU propaganda about how it can do everything; imagine if Chinese policymakers actually took what Americans say about themselves at face value!
> Instead, I put this all on the Euros.
Unless you’re a complete isolationist (which is at least a consistent position), Russia is your problem too. I am perfectly happy to note that the fact that someone else failed to act doesn’t excuse one’s own inaction. But that applies symmetrically: the European failure to act hardly justifies yours. And taking any EU pronouncements claiming strategic autonomy seriously is a mug’s game.
> (BTW - West Germany doesn't get any credit for re-integrating the DDR - you're expected to take care of your own.)
Well, I also think of the Russians as my own—they used to speak fairly good French. I don’t care to apportion ‘credit’; my original point is that we (both the US and EU) never properly tried soft power.
> It's in their backyard, they tell the US that they know how to deal with the USSR/Russia, and they claim to have the resources.
I’m not sure that we did or do, generally. These days, we talk about working towards strategic autonomy—about e.g. starting a European army or similar. But EU politicians generally don’t claim that we have achieved it—some merely think it’s a good idea to work towards it. And in those days it hardly seems that anyone wanted to kick the Americans out of the important summits &c. &c.
> I was pointing out that the Euros have made more than their share of screwups yet somehow always blame the US.
In a cock-up more than one party can have cocked up.
My point has nothing to do with what US policy makers think/say or even what the US did or didn't do. And the fact that a failed Russia is a problem for the US also misses the point. (The ex-DDR is Germany's responsibility even though a failed DDR is a problem for the US.)
Euros have been claiming for decades that they know how to do certain things with "soft power", that Americans should let them run things.
However, we're now seeing things happen that competent use of said soft-power was supposed to prevent.
The possible reasons are soft-power doesn't actually prevent those things, the implementation was flawed, inadequate resources, something/someone interfered, and no one bothered.
Do you want to go with "the US stopped the EU from using soft-power"?
I ask because all of the other reasons are all on the Euros. (Europe has the resources to do soft-power without US help; if a larger military is required, that lack is some combination of "flawed implementation" and "no one bothered" on Europe's part.)
This was the perfect opportunity to show that Europe really is superior and yet we're discussing why it's not their fault that soft-power didn't work.
And no, the US is not obligated to make soft-power work, let alone responsibility when the Euros fail at it.
As Steve Jobs said, the janitor can have excuses why he didn't do his job but an Apple VP doesn't get to have excuses.
> And in those days it hardly seems that anyone wanted to kick the Americans out of the important summits &c. &c.
You don't have to throw us out - just don't invite us. We're stupid and you're rich. You don't need us and we only screw things up.
> In a cock-up more than one party can have cocked up.
> > In a cock-up more than one party can have cocked up.
> That point was that only the US gets blamed.
Well, I didn’t do that, so I have no idea why you are attacking this strawman.
All I initially claimed was that soft power wasn’t tried properly. For some reason you seem to interpret this as an attack on the US which is why you’ve brought in the US-EU question, when it wasn’t relevant at all initially. I have no idea why you take any smug European remarks about our being maximally competent seriously, because nobody else would, and they hardly excuse failures in other countries’ planning.
It is also only your comments which apportion blame to one party only:
> I put this all on the Euros.
—
> The possible reasons are soft-power doesn't actually prevent those things, the implementation was flawed, inadequate resources, something/someone interfered, and no one bothered.
I’ve repeatedly said I agree that the implementation was flawed because nobody bothered with Russia in the same way that we did with other parts of Europe.
> Do you want to go with "the US stopped the EU from using soft-power"?
No, and your comments seem to assume that I did.
> And the fact that a failed Russia is a problem for the US also misses the point. (The ex-DDR is Germany's responsibility even though a failed DDR is a problem for the US.)
Well, yes, and if American policymakers spot that that someone else isn’t doing their job and they’re capable of doing it for them, it’s silly for them not to do so (and vice versa). It’s not like Americans or Europeans meaningfully attempt to avoid encroaching on others’ domains.
> This was the perfect opportunity to show that Europe really is superior
We’re talking about geopolitical strategy, not culture or food. Europe lost any claim to being any good at this sort of thing after WWII—we all know that.
> You don't have to throw us out - just don't invite us. We're stupid and you're rich. You don't need us and we only screw things up.
I hope you enjoy rebutting the imaginary Eurocrat you’re talking to on HN; of course Americans are stupid (compare the British occupation of Iraq a century ago to that tried most recently), but so are Europeans (see French mismanagement of Françafrique)—I am hardly claiming that we are any good at this, or even necessarily better than you.
One big difference is that Russia is the aggressor. Against Iran, the US would be the aggressor. Force may be unavoidable to stop aggression, but if you want a safer world, invading random countries for questionable reasons is a really bad idea.
Hard power and threats also failed to stop North Korea from developing thermonuclear weapons and ICBMs they can deliver to North America. Can’t see how it’s going to work out differently for Iran.
the crazy part is, just like the proverbial "iraq WMDs" the whole "iran threat" is mostly propaganda. sure they are "enriching uranium" but you have thousands of ALREADY READY nuclear weapons so why would they try to use their currently non-existing weapons against someone who does?
i have read on HN that "many countries opposed the US when it invaded iraq, afghanistan, yada yada" but the fact is, they way russia is being sidelined and singled out, no one has had the balls to do that with USA even when they managed to destroy sovereign nations in the interests of "free democracy" and other shenanigans.
> the crazy part is, just like the proverbial "iraq WMDs" the whole "iran threat" is mostly propaganda.
Here we disagree. Iran is a real threat, they are major backering force behind both Hamas and Hezbollah. The Islamic Republic (distinct from the Persian people) is ideologically driven and regularly chants Death to America and Death to Israel. I could definitely see the friction with Iran going hot.
go on and disagree. "regularly chants Death to America" does this really affect you to a point that you and your government are scared of threats and want to preemptively want to remove the threat?
" Death to Israel." why do you care about israel as an american? are you a citizen of that country also that you feel a sense of insecurity towards that?
" Iran is a real threat, they are major backering force behind both Hamas and Hezbollah". cool so america can destroy IRAQ, afghanistan, libya, syria, vietnam among others but irans threat are a concern for you. good.
I'm glad that you live in a country where you feel that threats to exterminate you are empty and can be dismissed. Might I guess from your comment that you live in a country with two oceans between it and any aggressors?
My own country is in fact surrounded by people who have tried multiple times to wipe us off the map with bombs, and failing that, now try to wipe us off the map with lie campaigns to influence social opinion. There is no reason to think that they won't continue to use bombs in the future. Perhaps if someone had a literal (not proverbial) warhead pointed at your children, then you would be less cavalier and naive.
funny you mention that. from your comments now it appears that you might live in israel and not the US as i initially made it to be so my question remains. Why, as an israeli you care if iran threatens america?
i kinda live in the middle of a clusterfuck also called "kashmir". go and look up the atrocities and war crimes being committed by india and pakistan against my fellow citizens on an ongoing basis and consider my words then.
i know how it looks like when you have men barging in your homes and they take you away, never to be seen again or your homes being targeted and razed to the ground. to not knowing if you will return home at the end of the day so yeah, i am in the middle of this and can say that.
>Perhaps if someone had a literal (not proverbial) warhead pointed at your children, then you would be less cavalier and naive.
For one thing, I care if Iran threatens Israel. That is the present tangible danger I address.
I admit to being generally ignorant of the situation in Kashmir. I know that Pakistan and India have been fighting over that beautiful land for decades, that both Hindi and Muslims live there. I assume that the Gawkadal massacre was against Muslims, though it is not stated specifically in the Wikipedia article. I would actually appreciate hearing more about your situation there, I have never met a Muslim from Kashmir and I'm certain that the popular media portrayal of the area is not accurate. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username. رمضان كريمط يا صديقي.
On the other hand, Ukraine had the pool of engineers and scientists to maintain / develop it, while Kazakhstan might have not: it's a smaller, mostly rural country. For example, in 1991, Ukraine had 15 nuclear reactors (~27% of the total electrical generational capacity) across 4 plants, while Kazakzhstan had a single reactor closed in 1999 ([2]).
Nobody in the world wants a nuclear-armed Kazakhstan.
On the other hand, Kazakhstan is much more stable politically, not permanently bankrupt or begging, and actually has good relations with both Russia and the West - all of that compared to Ukraine. Not sure they really want a nuclear survivor adventure instead.
Ukraine had stable relations with Russia until they decided they wanted to align with the west and adopt democracy when there was a color revolution in 2014. If they had remained a vassal state of Russia, their relationship would still be stable.
Similarly, the situation in Kazakhstan is stable because they are a vassal state of Russia. Watch what happened when there was the beginning of a color revolution there earlier this year: Russian quickly sent troops to assist the Kazakh government in violently putting it down. If a successful color revolution was to happen in Kazakhstan (unlikely), Russia would be playing the same military games with them that they are now doing with Ukraine.
But Kazakhstan is already very well aligned with the West. In many areas its policies are more westernized than these of Ukraine. It also has the economy to apply these policies to. It's just realistic about needing to be reasonably polite with Russia, its largest neighbour and biggest trade partner, while minding its own business.
Is there an example of a "successful" color revolution which brougt democracy and prosperity, instead of bringing Russian tanks and more coups de etat? You are exactly right - if one of these happens in Kazakhstan, RIP Kazakhstan. It's too complex of a country already.
Democracy is shrinking around the world, so as much as we like the concept theoretically, we should probably remove it from the definition of "stable". China seems quite stable too.
And Kazakhstan is not quite locked down like North Korea. You were thinking Turkmenistan, or just projecting your prejudice towards all Central Asia. It is not without problems, of course.
The reality was that these were Russian warheads on Kazakh and Ukrainian soil, so it wasn't so much "giving up nukes" as "getting rid of foreign nuclear armed forces".
The units actually holding the genocide weapons were loyal to Moscow, so becoming the de-facto owners would have involved fighting with Russian nuclear armed military units. YOLO indeed.
If anyone wants a detailed history of nuclear and biological weapons during the Cold War and the early post-Cold War days, I highly recommend The Dead Hand by David Hoffman
If we had a modular MSR reactor we could cart it there and "burn" it.
Otherwise can't you just de-enrich it by mixing in other Uranium isotopes and send it the usual way to the nuclear solid fuel rod monopoly?
Is what they actually mean is "it's REALLY valuable since it's already enriched weapons-grade, so how do we keep it until someone "safe" pays for it."?
Enriching (to much lower concentration of U-235) is also a part of nuclear fuel cycle, so a peaceful way of getting rid of this material would be to dilute it and make fuel.
There was a ban, but the US got around it by claiming they were upgrading existing one's or something like that. The key point being the agreement didnt mention anything about "upgrades" which is akin to building new nukes. Not the first time the US has done this when considering how Nato only provided a verbal agreement they wouldnt expand towards Russia and here we are now. Oh and lets not forget Crimea region (assuming sea area) is reportedly supposed to have the 4 largest oil deposits which always comes in handy when the Saudi's are running out hence the massive diversification drive seen in the middle east.
It wouldnt have taken much to find some spores, wild bird nesting sites will turn soil over and could still offer up some spores post bonfire, but it doesnt take much to bring on your own dormant biological weapon anthrax spores in todays world with easy access to knowledge across borders. Cows & Sheep are natural carriers, sheep more so due to their high copper content which is needed to make wool, which is why they used sheep in the original Anthrax Island experiment, but its basic biology growing your own bacteria now a days!
Militaries around the world when they did these sorts of experiments decades ago, never thought communication would improve to todays standards ie the internet which means alot of things they thought they could keep secret is no longer the case! One of their tactics with sensitive stuff is to use older people because they die off more quickly and the secrets die with them, plus old people dont get to spend time with the younger generation that could be an easy way to pass on secrets.
Moral of the story, talk to the older generation which might have worked in the military doing secret stuff to find out what they know. However even your grandparents who might have been in that situation, wont tell you everything they did, because it might protect you, so talk to random older people to find out stuff, less obvious connection then.
> There was a ban, but the US got around it by claiming they were upgrading existing one's or something like that. The key point being the agreement didnt mention anything about "upgrades" which is akin to building new nukes.
Given that we are talking about Uranium, and all the US stockpile uses Plutonium, I don't see how they would have used that for nukes.
As suggested by others, more probably they blended that with depleted Uranium and used as cheap fuel for reactors
No of course, that’s a completely logical story arc. Good thing it makes so much sense otherwise I’d be skeptical you were leaving some information out.
It’s Putins neighbours that desperately want to get into NATO so he doesn’t invade and slaughter them like he’s doing with Ukraine now. He has a history of his behaviour.
It may be a Kremlin talking point, but that doesn't make it baseless. It's a pretty well-known (and I should actually think uncontroversial) fact that Washington and its allies have been bolstering Ukrainian military capabilities in various ways for several years now. How else do you think Europe's poorest country has been able to withstand an invasion from Europe's strongest army so well?
The conflict has been horrific and bloody and I do not want to make light of this. But I think what we have seen over the last month or so should dispel any notion that Russia had anything close to the strongest military of the European countries.
Ukraine thankfully haven’t had to defend themselves against Russian nuclear weapons though. But if you go down that road, it would’ve made no difference whether the EU gave them absolutely nothing, or even twice the amount of military aid they have already given. Use of nuclear weapons would have been catastrophic against Ukraine circa 2014 (poorly equipped), Ukraine circa 2022 (well equipped) and basically any non-nuclear country whether they're rich or poor.
It's not immediately obvious to me that Russian nukes are still in perfect working order. From what I understand, they require quite a bit of maintenance, and even the US had to relearn how to maintain their nuclear weapons at some point.
It's not a chance I would want to take, but I think it's entirely possible that much of the Russian nuclear stockpile might not work anymore.
I wouldn't want to risk it but you're right that it's possible they weren't maintained properly from the fall of the USSR to today. I don't know exactly how fragile or picky the hardware is, but my guess would be that it takes a lot of care and effort (and therefore money) to do, in a country which probably had other priorities for much of the last 3 decades.
With Ukraine under the hood, it wouldn't have been that difficult. I know that NATO is a defensive alliance but it can go an offensive if members agree. Not saying that this is a valid argument for Russia invading Ukraine.
The West isn't thrusting these weapons into the unwilling hands of Ukranians.
Ukrainians want these weapons to defend themselves against the expansionist Putin regime.
Ukranians (the regular people) have in the past 10 years overthrown a Kremlin puppet government, elected a pro-Nato, pro-EU government and have now joined their armed forces to literally fight the Russian army off its lands.
It is the regular people of the old Soviet block that want to join Nato.
And a good thing they did. Without it, Russia might have easily conquered Ukraine.
Every argument against NATO, US or EU supporting eastern European countries is easily disproven by the current situation in Ukraine. Russia under Putin clearly is an expansionist aggressor.
> How else do you think Europe's poorest country has been able to withstand an invasion from Europe's strongest army so well?
Russia is not the strongest army of Europe. And it never has been for the last decades, as the war currently shows:
- Most of the command chain, not just in the military but especially in the intelligence services has been replaced by yes-men too afraid to report the actual truth to their superiors. Had Putin had decent intel, I highly doubt he'd have gone through with invading Ukraine in the first place, or at the very least with a different tactic. Russian leaders clearly thought they would be welcomed by Ukrainians as liberators, so the Russians didn't start off with embedding special-ops teams weeks if not months before to liquidate the Ukrainian leadership or to destroy critical defensive infrastructure.
- ETA: Russia additionally lost a huge amount of intel in the last years after the Western countries yeeted a lot of their embassy staff for being spies as a consequence of the various sometimes extremely dangerous murders and murder attempts (Litvinenko, Skripal, Navalny, Gluschkow and a lot of others).
- Their equipment is aged - just look at the various OSINT Twitter accounts, most of what is destroyed or taken over by the Ukrainian Tractor Army is old Soviet-era shit. The sightings of any modern heavy tanks or other weaponry are very very low.
- Their equipment is extremely shoddily maintained. The stuff hasn't been moved around for years, parts were taken to repair other equipment and replacement parts been replaced by inferior quality parts (e.g. tires). The result is that stuff breaks down left and right.
- The soldiers sometimes aren't even soldiers. A big part of why the invasion went so sideways so quickly was that the second and third waves were not soldiers - they were OMON or SOBR units, glorified riot cops. Or conscripts being forced to fight in Ukraine. Or ordinary people being press-ganged [1].
- The soldiers are paid shit. No matter where you gather reports from - from Russia over Belarus to Ukraine, there is a common pattern of soldiers selling fuel, weapons, ammo and spare parts for vodka and food, of lootings, of rape.
- The soldiers are completely untrained or severely undertrained. There are videos circulating that show just how much difficulty the soldiers have in driving a tank - obviously they are going to run into difficulties, and they did so when they had to go off the street and into the treacherous half-frozen, half muddy ground. Not to mention the discipline issues from above.
- The soldiers are badly equipped. Partially because vital equipment like encrypted radios or navigation systems have never been bought (because the order got reduced somewhere along the chain and someone bought a nice new car instead), partially because it has been stolen and "privatized", partially because no one gave a damn (many years expired MREs). All together, that makes for pretty low morale and fighting efficiency. And a good laugh if every highway sign points to The Hague!
- There is a massive lack of infantry as it is in every other army of the world. Sending in a column of tanks undefended is a clear suicide mission, and yet Russia didn't have another choice - the result was that Ukrainians, sometimes equipped with literal WW2 panzerfausts or over 100 years old machine guns [1] had it as easy as shooting on clay practice targets... the tanks couldn't fight back, they couldn't move, they were prime targets. Add to that that the equipment is in a bad condition which means in addition to tanks shot down by the Ukrainian Army, the tank columns were constantly stopped by one of their tanks breaking down, meaning that the following tanks were even easier for the Ukrainian Army to blast to pieces.
- Only God knows what's up with Russian anti-aircraft defense. Really. There is no explanation why the Russian Army fails to defend itself against the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones... a fact that Ukrainian soldiers quickly turned into a war song.
- The Russian Army seems to have been a lot more posturing and grand-standing than actual fighting experience. There were regular bloodbaths caused by them over the last decades, yes, but if you look at where the Russians and their goons fought it's no surprise: some backwater piss poor countries with hardly any men and weapons to fight against. Now that they are fighting in Ukraine, which propped up its army and its militia (such as the infamous Azov batallion) since 2014, the Russian Army sees a real conflict for the first time.
And finally, Ukrainians have something worth fighting for, and every war crime the Russians commit only incentivizes them more: their lives and freedom. Nothing what Russia does can even closely match that. The Ukrainians will be fighting until their last breath with every bit of power they have - and their leadership is symbolizing that every single day.
That Panzerfaust 3 they're using is not a WW2 weapon, but a very distant modern successor. Unlike the original Panzerfaust, it had a double (tandem) shaped warhead that enables it to punch through reactive armor that would stop a regular shaped warhead.
It’s Putins neighbours that desperately want to get into NATO so he doesn’t invade and slaughter them like he’s doing with Ukraine now. He has a history of his behaviour.
And it was the Cuban government that wanted Soviet missiles on Cuba as a deterrent against another Bay of Pigs Invasion.
I was thinking recently about how both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Russian invasion of Ukraine had wildly insufficient hard power put into them by the aggressors, in part because of groupthink causing the leadership to wildly underestimate their opponents and overestimate the local support for the exiles who formed part of the invasion force.
(I also wonder how much of what I think happened in the Cold War is what actually happened, and how much is just the stories my side likes to tell itself. One of the fun things I found when learning German is that it has the same word for both “history” and “story”: “Geschichte”).
I am German and I don't think I have ever really noticed this. Even though they are the same words letter by letter, they are still two completely separate words conceptually, i.e. Geschichte is not understood to generally mean story and sometimes in in a certain context to more specifically mean a story about the past, i.e. history. The origin however may be exactly this, but I don't know that.
I think it's also worth remembering it was not just the Bay of Pigs, the CIA also had also been conducting "Operation Mongoose" where it performed terrorist attacks and dropped bombs on Cuba and various other activities. This stopped a little after the crisis, so it seems to have been effective in that respect.
My point is that US security interests outweighed Cuba's sovereignty and security interests in face of a real threat. But when people talk about a NATO membership of Ukraine or other neighbors of Russia, then their sovereignty is often portrait as absolute and whatever Russia thinks can not possibly be relevant.
Or take Stuxnet and the damage it caused, that is really just a more sophisticated way of dropping a bomb onto those enrichment facilities. What does that say about Iranian sovereignty? The Russian invasion is certainly unjustified and will probably end up achieving the exact opposite if NATO expansion was a major concern for Russia - I am neither saying it was, but I tend to think so, nor that it was the sole reason.
But in a hypothetical future were Ukraine became a NATO member and NATO placed or planned to place certain assets in Ukraine while there was no good faith attempt to consider Russian concerns - and I am again not saying that there were no attempts or that Russia was not responsible that such attempts did not yield a solution - there might be a justification to at least target military assets if we apply standards consistently.
> My point is that US security interests outweighed Cuba's sovereignty and security interests in face of a real threat
You're having trouble reconciling this because because you're not viewing the USA as "the bad guy" when it comes to Cuba. There are similarities in the two situations - large country repeatedly interfering in newly independent smaller neighbour (who they insist belongs within their sphere of influence), who in turn reaches out internationally for allies to help with defence. But to acknowledge this similarity you need to willing to recognise that the USA was the aggressor in Cuba, just as Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine.
I think you understood my comment as almost the opposite of what I wanted to say. My point is that if US security concerns were a valid reason to oppose Soviet missiles in Cuba, then by the same standard Russian security concerns are - or at least can be - a valid reason to oppose an Ukrainian NATO membership or at least an unrestricted placement of NATO assets in Ukraine.
Or the other way around, you can not easily argue that the USA can decide whether or not Cuba can have missiles and at the same time argue that Russia has absolutely no say in what kind of NATO assets end up in Ukraine. And to be even more specific, I am not arguing that both can not be true at the same time, they are not identical situations and all the small differences might add up and make a difference.
But this is something one has to make a case for, Ukraine is a sovereign state and decides for itself whether or not it joins NATO doesn't cut it, at least in my opinion. Or pick the other side and argue that Cuba should have been allowed to host missiles and the USA was wrong preventing this, which probably will imply that Russia or China should be allowed to place missiles in Cuba today.
No one forced Putin to invade and commit war crimes in a so-called “brotherly” neighbour.
Sure, but. The USA did not tolerate Soviet missiles on Cuba and I am not sure this has changed - would the USA tolerate Russian or Chinese missiles at its border today? Therefore just saying that the Ukraine or any other Russian neighbor are sovereign states and can do whatever they want is at least somewhat of a double standard.
And just to be clear, I am not justifying the invasion, I am not saying that there was no attempt to find a compromise, I am not saying that Russia is not responsible that no compromise was reached, I am just saying that states constantly have interests in what other states are doing or not doing, and saying Ukraine or any other state is sovereign and can do whatever they want without consequences is naive a point of view and at best yields the correct conclusions by accident.
With that said, I still hope that the Ukraine will defeat the Russians as quickly as possible, with as little casualties as possible on both sides, and regain control of the entire territory as it was until 2014.
There is no need whatsoever that Ukraine, having joined NATO, to then have NATO bases, nuclear weapons or even any strategic weapons on its territory. This could be made a legal requirement by the joining treaty.
That this is threat to Russia is a Russian propaganda talking point.
There is no need whatsoever that Ukraine, having joined NATO, to then have NATO bases, nuclear weapons or even any strategic weapons on its territory. This could be made a legal requirement by the joining treaty.
I completely agree, after all that is the situation with Norway. And as I said, I am not claiming that there were no such attempts nor am I blaming one side or the other that this didn't lead to a solution. I am just opposing this notion that sovereignty is all that counts and therefore Russia's opinion can not possibly matter.
That this is threat to Russia is a Russian propaganda talking point.
This I just can not understand. If you have a thousand tanks a thousand kilometres away from my border, then you are a smaller threat than if you have your thousand tanks right at my border, even if the only difference is that it takes you some time to drive to my border which gives me some time to prepare for your attack. We can argue all day long how big a difference it makes, but I can not see how you can argue that bringing NATO assets closer to the Russian border threatens Russia less than having the further away.
Russian propaganda works hard to make people equate "Ukraine in Nato = NATO tanks on RU border, NATO nuclear weapons in Ukraine" which we've both agreed is false.
I agree that NATO weapons on the RU border are a threat to Russia, but then they're already in the Baltic countries, so how would Ukraine be different ?
All this points to a good old "might makes right" spheres of influence competition.
This is not waste. This is weapons grade fissile material. It was taken to Oak Ridge for storage and very likely used to maintain the US nuclear weapons stockpile.
Most nuclear waste really isn't that scary and even when it's scary it's not scary for very long. i.e the half life of the really nasty stuff is pretty short. Also storing it under water or in concrete is generally good enough. We only really worry about leakage into groundwater etc when thinking about very long term storage.
Basically risks/worries about nuclear waste are massively overblown, humans have a hard time comprehending large numbers in relation to other large numbers. They see long half life and that is it, few stop to consider concentration etc.
TLDR: stuff in article not waste. Stored securely at national labs and weapons facilities or shoved into bombs.
In addition to all the other comments explaining why this would be a bad idea, this also misses a core point, uranium is rarely if ever transported in atomic form. What's usually transported is uranium hexafluoride (UF6) which has low levels of radioactivity.
…and back to the mere weight and density. Yeah, it’ll fit in the back of your hatchback, but after dragging the rear for a few minutes, one good bump might punch it right through the floor.
Presumably, you'd need to store it in something, and have adequate protection against the radioactivity. I'm also reasonably convinced that storing highly dense (and volatile?) radioactive material as a condensed cube is a bad idea in many respects.
I'm wondering if the efforts here to remove nuclear material are somehow related, and if the story in this article is 100% true to the facts. At least I find it strange that Russia would happily see the material handed off like that, and I think it's more likely that all of this happened behind the back of Russia.