At the time, Russia couldn't even quickly deal with Chechnya by force.

1. It's not obvious to me you can't reverse-engineer the necessary timing information, especially when you have a bunch of nuclear weapons experts and a huge stockpile allowing you to take apart a few and use that knowledge on the rest. To my knowledge, the PAL system was intended to prevent weapons from being detonated by rouge officers or thieves; it wasn't designed to thwart states.

2. Even if all the conventional explosions are worthless, you still have all the nuclear material and other extremely sophisticated equipment involved with boosting, etc. It's not like creating new nukes from scratch.

I think for this conversation to continue productively, we need experts to weigh in on these issues.

They're not movie bombs where doing something wrong sets them off. PALs were very much the fail safe kind of device because if messing with them could set off the warhead then you've just discovered the way to detonate the warhead which a PAL was designed to prevent from happening. Nukes are also relatively safe in that it requires a very carefully timed sequence of explosion to properly implode the core so an accidental triggering is just a dirty bomb instead of a nuclear detonation.

Or the nuke does an intentional fizzle (sets off the implosion in an intentionally asymmetric manner resulting in plutonium being spread all over, but no nuclear criticality) which seems like the most serious-but-still-plausible "fuck you for trying this" mechanism I can think of.

How much of nukes is even hardware vs software? I'd naively think that you'd probably just rip out the core of the device and wire up a new thing that can zap it to go boom.

Pick nukes from a country that doesn't use PALs - like the UK.

Edit: Physically getting hold of a UK nuke might be a bit tricky....

> Russia alone controlled the codes needed to operate

If Ukraine had held on to those nukes, disconnected, an engineer today could re-work them to function under Kiev’s command. (American PALs from the era have de-classified weaknesses that merited upgrades. Post-USSR nuclear safekeeping was roundly criticised for decades [1].)

Even barring that, possessing fissile material is no small feat. It would give Kiev the credible capability to e.g. threaten large sections of Russian agricultural production. That’s the sort of thing that deters tanks.

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SE-11.pdf

> “Until then, Ukraine had the world's third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile, of which Ukraine had physical, but not operational, control. Russia alone controlled the codes needed to operate. Their use was dependent on Russian-controlled electronic Permissive Action Links and the Russian command and control system”

I don't know where they got it, the book author cited in Wiki. The man cited read too much Tom Clancy I guess.

USSR nuclear weapons had no permissive action links as such

Kazakhstan's, and Ukrainian's nukes were fully operational, sans confused nuclear weapons officer command chain.

The launch codes were employed, but they were used solely for checking the authenticity of launch, and targetting commands.

The former states of the USSR agreed that Russia was the continuator state of the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_of_states#Soviet_Un... The "the Soviet Union ceased to exist" argument was also used to circumvent the agreement not to expand NATO towards the east. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16117-document-06-record-...

Was the code 00000000?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nu...

Most people recognize Russia to be the successor state to the Soviet Union, much like how they recognize that the Fifth French Republic is the successor state to the Fourth French Republic.

Those were simple gun-type pure fission weapons (~6 kiloton), which are two orders of magnitude smaller than the typical thermonuclear weapons (~1 megaton) left by the USSR in Ukraine.