Placement of Nukes doesn’t mean giving up control as well.
It depends on how many troops you have protecting them.
This type of thing is the only move Putin has left. He’s not gonna nuke anyone. All he can do is bluster and do symbolic things like this.
Except for this:
Putin said Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has long asked to have nuclear weapons in his country again as a counter to NATO. Belarus shares borders with three NATO members — Latvia, Lithuania and Poland — and Russia used its territory as a staging ground to send troops into neighboring Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Putin noted that Russia helped modernize Belarusian military aircraft last year to make them capable of carrying nuclear warheads. He said 10 such planes were ready to go. He said nuclear weapons also could be launched by the Iskander short-range missiles that Russia provided to Belarus last year.
I’m sure staging warheads in the country that’s been asking for warheads for a long time, and already had two different weapon systems for delivering those warheads, will go exactly as Putin expects it to…
Let me be the first to congratulate Belarus on becoming the world’s most recent nuclear power.
Speaking from personal experience, special weapons can be staged on host nation delivery systems without giving up custody.
Launching an unarmed nuke doesn’t result in a nuclear explosion.
The ability to arm the warhead is the key and is exclusively controlled by the custodian, not the host nation.
IMO Putin won’t hand over the nuclear football to a neighbor who could turn against him.
Yeah, the Permissive Action Links (PALs).
I would like to see Putin’s forces routed, then Putin seething and twitching in humiliation and rage with his finger on the metaphorical nuclear button, wanting to press but knowing he shouldn’t…
You have far more optimism about Putin’s restraint to pull the temple down upon his head than I do.
Stranger
I don’t want the world resting on Putin’s knowledge of what he shouldn’t do.
Huh. This was something I never spoke about but now I see there’s a Wiki about it:
“Bypassing a PAL should be, as one weapons designer graphically put it, about as complex as performing a [tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end.”
— Peter D. Zimmerman, nuclear physicist and weapons inspector
PAL devices have been installed on all nuclear devices in the US arsenal. The US Navy was last to receive them with all weapons fitted with PALs by 1996 or 1997.
Or pounding madly on Hillary’s reset button. 
I’m with @Stranger_On_A_Train & @Chronos just above …
PAL is a US-specific system. Did/do the Soviets/Russians have something broadly similar? Do they, as USN once did, simply bypass it by programming all the arming combos to be “0000” or whatever and making that fact well-known in the field? Hell if I know.
I do know, but ain’t tellin’, how the USAF did it 30 years ago when that shit was part of my job description. The Russians in 2023? Whole different kettle of thoroughly rotten fish.
I mean, if you have possession of a nuclear weapon and a reasonable amount of time, can’t you just disassemble it and then reassemble it without the security system? It won’t be easy, of course, but it’ll be easier than building a nuke from scratch.
According to the wiki article, a PAL may feature a self-distruct anti-tamper system:
Given what we’ve seen of the operational rigor of the Russian military in the past year, I think it’s safe to assume that many if not all of their nuclear weapons systems may have any number of missing or malfunctioning components. The neutron initiator or missile propellant might have deteriorated beyond use (good). Or those might be working, but the PAL safeguards aren’t properly enabled (bad, quite bad).
Unfortunately there’s only one way to find out. And even if Russia’s nukes are 90% neglected and defunct, that’s still enough to trigger a chain of events that would be worse than a combination of every war, famine, pandemic, and economic depression from the 18th century onward.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the worry in the West was what would happen to that country’s thousands of nuclear weapons. Would “loose” nukes fall into the hands of terrorists, rogue states, criminals – and plunge the world into a nuclear nightmare?
Former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker recounts the epic story of how American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers.
Fortunately, scientists and technical experts in both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union rolled up their sleeves to manage and contain the nuclear problem in the dissolving Communist country.
I can’t find any reference to their ultimate solution, but it stands to reason that the retrofit of PALs were part of it.
(Re)building a nuclear weapon is not something that can be done in the field with a couple of Allen wrenches, a drill press, and an Arduino, and, assuming modern security systems are used which are designed to prevent nuclear yield except under a set of well-defined conditions, the weapon may not be usable without essentially a complete rebuild.
However, nuclear weapons have to conform to the military’s deployment and command-and-control requirements. I did ask once on these forums whether the Royal Navy, e.g. Trident, employed any sort of strict PALs, and while there was no definitive answer (not that we should expect any details), the gist of the answers appeared to be that, no, there is not. (At least we can say that someplace and sometime ultimate control of deployed nuclear weapons was in the hands of the commander whose responsibility it is to launch them—certainly this was true in the case of the U.S. as well.)
Thus, since the 1960s, the US has offered its own PAL technologies to other nuclear powers…In 1971, the US also offered its technology to the Soviet Union, which developed a similar system.
The Russians have the technology. How broadly and consistently it’s applied and what condition it’s in remain unknown.
Reading the Wiki article, it’s clear that the US PAL system is not used by every country. How good their home-grown controls are is unclear, for obvious reasons.
Even if they are used, while it may be difficult to bypass these systems, it’s not impossible. These systems are mostly designed with the intent of stopping a rogue element from detonating a warhead, should they somehow gain access to one. But a nation-state government, even a relatively small one like Belarus, is very different from a “rogue element”. They can dedicate resources to this project far in excess of any non-state actor.
I mean, take a look at North Korea. As a country, they’re a complete basket case, but they still managed to make their own bombs, something that no non-state actor has ever been able to do.
And it only takes a few nukes to become a nuclear power. Belarus could screw up 90% of their attempts at removing such controls, and still be ahead of the game.
Still, if Belarus could pick the lock and take full control of the weapons in their physical custody, what would they do with them? I never got the impression they were anything more than a grudging staging point into Ukraine, and certainly not up for unilateral escalation in that theater.
I guess I don’t know what cracking the Russian PALnsystem gets them in practical terms. They have no one to use the weapons on, or even credibly threaten with them.
Seriously dude? They’re sitting right next to the best example of why a country should never, under any circumstances, give up their nukes. Do you really think anyone in Belarus doubts that Putin would invade them as well, should he conceive of that being to his benefit?
Just because you’re making nice with the local bully in hopes that he beats up someone else doesn’t mean you pass on free karate lessons.
I’d expect every country even remotely Russia-adjacent is giving some thoughts to getting nukes. Belarus is about to be handed nukes.
The Belarussian government is already a de facto wholly-owned subsidiary of Putin’s Russia. As in Russia proper, most of officialdom has already cast their lot with Putin.
The general public may, in private, have other wishes about their future. But they understand that whatever form that future takes, any significant changes will be both post-Lukashenko and post-Putin. And maybe not even that soon.
The idea that there’s a bunch of Belarussian military folks itching to get a hold of some Russian nukes so they can repurpose them against Moscow is real far-fetched. Bordering on fantasy IMO. And of course if any such plotters exist, they are keeping their plans deeply deeply secret or else they’ll be very promptly deeply deeply dead.
I suspect that even then Russia will maintain much tighter control over the weapons and delivery systems than the US does/did in the latter years of NATO.
The early '60s deployments of US tactical nukes on NATO territory was similarly heavy-handed. This was back when nobody quite trusted the Germans yet and France might have gone “commie” as the phobias of the time had it. In public, the Germans had both the weapons and the delivery systems. In private, not really. Enough Americans were injected into their processes that they could neither steal, sabotage, nor use the weapons except on US say-so. There was a LOT more to the custody process than simply relying on the secret coded PALs. Those were a last line of defense, not the first.