Katja (mercurial)🇨🇭

On the Matter of “Our Own Nuclear Weapons” That Ukraine Was Forced to Surrender One cannot simply hand over nuclear weapons that are truly one’s own. If the arsenal is genuinely yours, you can always make more of it. You can enrich fresh uranium in centrifuges. You can put the same plants that once assembled the warheads back to work producing new ones. You can call upon the scientists who designed them to reconstruct the old drawings. You can modernise the command systems and delivery platforms that already exist.If you possess none of these things—centrifuges, factories, scientists, design bureaus, command structures—then you never possessed nuclear weapons in the first place. What is far more striking about the nuclear question is the sheer scale of Ukraine’s economic and scientific collapse, which left it unable to produce such weapons at all. Under the Soviet Union and within Russia these lands ranked among the richest and most advanced. The entire political, scientific, technical and literary elite naturally spoke Russian; nothing prevented that state of affairs from continuing. Yet once the ruling class and the activists, eager for the approval of Western NGOs, launched their own Cultural Revolution and set about turning the country into a Greater Galicia “from the river to the sea,” the technical and scientific elite simply departed. Among those who left were precisely the people capable of building a nuclear bomb. When the West presented Ukraine with its price—“transform yourselves into anti-Russia and we shall admit you into the Western world”—no one grasped that such a price is demanded only by those who intend to renege on the bargain in any case. However far Russia itself may have declined after the Soviet collapse, it has still preserved, as we can see, an order of magnitude more of its industrial and scientific capacity than the Ukraine that was trampled underfoot by activists and by its own version of BLM. Such is the price of the triumph of “pro-Western activists” and NGOs.