No Nukes for Ukraine

A nuclear arsenal would be an insane indulgence that they could not afford.

Michael Rubin takes arming Ukraine to new extremes:

If the world allows Russia to remain a unitary state and if it allows Putinism to survive Putin, then Ukraine should be allowed to maintain its own nuclear deterrence, whether it joins NATO or not.

Whenever the war ends, Ukraine will need many things, but a costly and useless nuclear arsenal isn’t one of them. If Ukraine were to have its own arsenal, it would also need to build an indigenous nuclear weapons program for the purpose of maintaining and modernizing its arsenal over time. Just as that would have been a heavy burden on newly-independent Ukraine thirty years ago, it would also be a heavy burden on Ukraine in the future. Ukraine will need all its resources for rebuilding and recovering from the war. A nuclear arsenal would be an insane indulgence that they could not afford, and that’s the best case scenario. “Allowing” Ukraine to have its own nukes would be like “allowing” a drowning man to hold on to an anchor.