eta: ninja’d by @johnny_l.a because I’m bad at YouTube.
This is also an excellent point. In 2014, Russia intervened in eastern Ukraine, at first covertly and then openly, to peel off the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as quasi-independent buffer states and Russian dependencies, and outright invaded and seized Crimea. And of course over the last couple of months has very visibly and deliberately built up an invasion force on Ukraine’s borders.
One would think that if Ukraine had nuclear weapons, they might have mentioned it to Russia in 2014 or in the last couple of months…
So Russia may have sorta dirty-bombed Europe already.
I was going to reference that, actually, but then thought better of it 
That is probably the best refutation of this hypothetical. You don’t hide the nukes until you have to use them. When Putin threatened invasion, that would be the point where you would say, “Just for your information, we have some nukes if it becomes necessary.”
The fact that no threats have come out are basically proof that there aren’t any.
I was going to post the ‘nukes as deterrent’ point. I see that I have been repeatedly beaten to it. Last time I checked, the general consensus was that Israel might have nuclear weapons. Everybody in a position to know for sure basically says ‘I will neither confirm nor deny that we have them. But do you want to risk it?’
Or they put it in a container and trucked it to Moscow a year ago.
Were I the current Ukraine government, in possession of a few working nukes, that’s what I would have done.
But again, once invasion became obvious, why keep that a secret? Either tell Putin to back off or lose Moscow, or just use it. It’s a Russian-made bomb any way, everybody believes Ukraine gave up all their bombs, and some Russians making a really bad mistake on the eve of war is kind of plausible.
Hell, at this point, I’d probably lie and say I did have just such a nuke in place, even if I didn’t; they’ve got nothing to lose. Having the Russians tearing up their own cities looking for a non-existent nuke could only help at this point.
This type of decapitation strike would not be effective—for one thing, since it has been discussed in the thread, Russia does have the Doomsday Machine.
Yeah, but that feels like a United States kind of problem, and in this hypothetical, I’m Ukrainian
The US government has a group called the Nuclear Emergency Support Team and I believe one of the things they quietly do is to look for signs of a rogue nuke in major cities. I would not at all be surprised if the Russians have a similar group.
In my work at the patent office, one of my areas is nuclear technology, and I’ve seen patents for systems to scan shipping containers for such items. There’s some neat stuff out there, but one of the points they commonly make is that there are just so many such containers moving around that it’s pretty impractical to scan them all.
I would very very surprised.
How so? Providing a credible threat to your enemies is literally the only use of most nuclear weapons. Most especially when you are a militarily weak power threatened by much stronger nuke-owning neighbor, who has somehow squirreled away a couple of old cold war nukes.
The actual military value is nil, you might (and its a pretty big maybe, given the presumed lack of delivery systems) be able to flatten an Russian city but that would do nothing to stop the Russian army (except they may pause while the Russian nuclear missiles reduce Ukraine to a glowing hole in the ground).
The only way they would do anything for you is to publicly make a big deal about the fact you have a nuclear arsenal and are prepared to use it if attacked. They fact they haven’t done that makes the (already very very low) likelyhood of them having nukes practically zero.
If we’re going to stipulate “Ukraine has nukes” I think it’s more plausible that Ukraine may have one or a few tactical nukes that wouldn’t do all that much to Moscow, but would make a hell of a mess on a battlefield. Of course using them would almost certainly result in a massive retaliation by Russia, but if Ukraine could knock out a couple of Russian offenses the generals might think twice about blindly supporting Putin.
Since I like reading, here would be my take on it for a bit of military SF fiction:
An evil genius decides that he wants his own nuke arsenal, so he has a secluded evil lair with a lovely manufacturing setup. His minions fabricate duplicate warheads, with a neutral substance for weight, and some sneakily sourced radioactive material from Chernobyl to give them the right radioactive count. He has his other minions slide them in while smuggling out the real ones - giving him half a dozen nuke warheads.
Cue petting white fluffy cat and chortling with glee.
The fake warheads don’t have to actually work, just sort of glow in the dark when a radiac is waved in the right direction, with the serial numbers checking ou ton hte paperwork.
If there’s something this crisis has taught the world it’s never, ever give up your nukes.
I’ll let Iran know.
"The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!”
- Dr Strangelove
People like to rag on Iran and North Korea for wanting nukes, saying they’re “crazy” and things like that.
Except for a small nation that has powerful enemies, it’s actually quite rational to want nukes. As I mentioned elsewhere, the rules are fundamentally different when dealing with countries that are nuclear powers. Even a superficial examination of the history of the last 50 years or so will show that. Pakistan gets away with a lot of shady shit, because they have nukes.
I’m in weird position here: I agree that having more countries become nuclear powers is a really bad idea. I’ll support just about any program or project directed towards limiting the proliferation of nukes. But at the same time, I fully understand why some countries really want them, and are doing their damndest to acquire them.
And if, like North Korea, they manage to pull off building a nuke, despite all we’ve done to try to prevent that, well, then, they’ve found the Golden Ticket, and the rest of us have to deal with that.
It’s more than that. They were, as I understand it, never entirely outside of the control of the Russians in the first place. The forces on Ukrainian soil that possessed the weapons were not really loyal to the Ukrainian state, and it probably would have provoked armed conflict if Ukrainian forces had tried to take overt total control of them.