Stephan Witoszynskyj:
I was recommending throughout that Ukraine should have kept a couple of
dozen TACTICAL nuclear weapons. Yes, give up the ICBMs and the strategic
nuclear weapons � these are too expensive to maintain, too hard to learn to
control, and in any case inessential. I assume that it would have been a
minor problem to store and maintain the tactical nuclear weapons, and that
the tacticals were operable by Ukraine. What would be the yield of the
larger of the tacticals? If anything close to Hiroshima � then their mere
possession would have been all Ukraine needed for an effective deterrant
against invasion. The possession of tacticals weaker than Hiroshima would
have been good enough, because the possibility (however remote) of losing
the downtown core of its capital would have been almost as effective a
deterrant to any potential invader as the thought of losing the capital
together with its suburbs.
Lubomyr Prytulak
On Tue, 14 Oct 1997, Lubomyr Prytulak wrote:
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[Lots of text deleted] Lubomyr Prytulak |
To which Stephan Witoszynskyj commented on Oct 15:
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IMO there were a lot of wrong assumptions in your mail. As somebody has
stated the Ukraine never had control over the nuclear weapons on it's
territory. Nuclear bombs (especially missiles) aren't just simple bombs
were you just press a trigger and they explode. Both, the US and the USSR,
developed complicated technical methods and command structures to prevent
that some local officer could launch a missle. In the USSR the command
structures were even stricter in the US. That's why strategic submarines
were not liked very much, because they are always quite independent. So to be honest the Ukraine never had it's own nuclear missiles, they were just "Russian" (because they were controlled from Moscow) missiles stationed on Ukrainian territory. That's a big difference the assumed nuclear weapons in North Korea, because North Korea could control it's weapons. The Ukraine still has several atomic power stations that are able of producing nuclear material for bombs. Soviet atomic power stations were constructed not only produce "civil" electric power, but also to have a high output of "bomb" material. That's why e.g. Tschernobyl didn't have security technologies as Western atomic power stations. Of course just to have the "bomb" material is not enough, but for terrorist acts it would be still enough. The situation might have looked a little bit different if the Ukraine would have managed to crack the launch codes of the missiles, but I don't know enough about nuclear weapons to say how they could have tried out if they've got the correct codes. Stephan Witoszynskyj |