This was so close to being a good article. But then the author went and killed my gleeful building buzz:
The reality is that nuclear weapons wouldn't have saved Crimea and can't protect Kiev from Moscow.
Oh! So close.
The author goes on to justify the latter part of that statement by going over cases of non-nuclear powers fighting nuclear powers and concluding that nukes don't deter military aggression against the holder of nukes.
It is true that if Ukraine had possessed nuclear weapons that Russia would not have been deterred from taking Crimea.
But this does not prove the latter statement that nukes would generally be useless for Ukraine. Indeed, the examples of Israel and Britain simply prove the first correct statement.
As I've written before about Russia's military power, Moscow's massive nuclear arsenal does not protect them from invasion:
[The] threat of nuclear retaliation is really only credible when national survival is at stake. Would Russia really nuke China, for example, if China merely took Vladivostok and limited border regions in the Far East?
If Russia lobbed nukes at China for that, China would then nuke European Russia, possibly including Moscow. Is the threat really credible when you consider that? Remember, the threat of nuclear retaliation is to preserve your nation. But using nukes when it prompts a nuclear response that devastates your nation is rather missing the point, isn't it? ...
In theory, you can say that a country will use nukes if national existence is threatened. And you can say with good confidence that a country won't use nukes in response to a terror attack or cyber-attack or in a border skirmish where a few hundred square yards of territory changes hand. But between those extremes, where is the dividing line?
So yeah, if Ukraine had owned nukes, Crimea would still have been invaded and Ukrainian threats to use nukes against Russia to save Crimea would not have been credible.
(Let's leave aside the very touchy issue of whether Ukrainian use of nukes on their own territory--that is, in Crimea--against Russian invading forces would risk Russian nuclear escalation against Ukrainian cities--which would then lead Ukraine to strike Russian cities inside Russia.)
But the reasons Argentina's attack on the Falklands and Egypt's and Syria's attacks across the Suez Canal and into the Golan Heights, respectively, did not lead to nuclear responses was because the threats were not threats to Britain's or Israel's national existence.
A Russian attack that goes all the way to Kiev pretty much erases Ukraine, and that level of threat could justify use of nuclear weapons.
And keep in mind that Israel was readying nukes just as the Syrian attack on Golan was reaching its high water mark. Had the Syrians pushed just a little farther, we might have an example of how nukes are used when national survival is at stake.
And I don't understand why the author starts out the article by saying nukes wouldn't save Kiev when he very clearly understands that there is a threshold of threats below which nuclear weapons are not a credible response--and therefore a level above which that deterrence value changes.
Indeed, his example of Russia falling back after pushing close to Tblisi in the Russo-Georgia War of 2008 bolsters this concept. Obviously, Georgia had no nukes and we weren't offering a nuclear umbrella. But Russia pulled back.
I say that Russian military failures in the advance deterred them from risking a fight for the capital. This shows that nuclear weapons are no substitute for conventional power.
As an aside, I find the author's claim that Ukraine gave up their inherited Russian nukes to prove they are a Western country is just ridiculous given that America, Britain, France, and even Israel retain nuclear weapons. In what world was/is possession of nukes something that keeps you out of the Western club?
And no matter what the difficulty Ukraine would have maintaining nuclear weapons, Russia could never be sure that all of them would not work.
On the bright side, the author notes that conventional deterrence against Russian invasion requires the type of reputation that Finland earned in the Winter War of 1939-1940.
So yeah, Ukraine needs a conventional military force to deter the Russians from invading and grabbing territory where the stakes are less than national survival.
But Kiev having nukes makes the Russians calculate how far they can push Ukraine without triggering the national survival instinct that makes use of nuclear weapons against Russia seem justified.
Really, this was so close to being a really excellent article on an important subject, marred fatally by the statement that Ukrainian nukes couldn't save Kiev, which is contradicted by much of what the author lays out as his case for that point.
