Ukraine Was a Nuclear Power. Just Like Nebraska Is.

There are way, way too many articles, blogs, and commentaries about Ukraine right now, and a lot of them like to talk about how things would be different had Ukraine kept its nuclear weapons twenty-some years ago. I wrote about this last week, but here is a firmer response: Ukraine never had command control over nuclear weapons.

You wouldn’t know that by reading most of these articles, of course. There seems to be a large amount of historical illiteracy here, and editors aren’t doing sufficient fact checking. But to call Ukraine a former nuclear power would be like saying Nebraska is a nuclear power today or would be a nuclear power if it declared independence tomorrow. Yes, Nebraska would have a lot of nuclear weapons on their sovereign soil. But they wouldn’t have command control over the missiles. All told, they would really only have large chunks of metal holding radioactive materials. That is not the same thing as being a nuclear power, which would seem to imply the ability to…I don’t know…nuke someone.

So, media of the world, please stop saying how Ukraine made a mistake in giving up nuclear weapons. They were never theirs to give up–they just let Russian officials safely dismantle them and ship them back to Russia…which is pretty much what you would expect a country to do if it suddenly found large chunks of metal with radioactive material inside.