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In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum. The short version is that Ukraine destroyed its Soviet nukes, and in return, the signatories pledged to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and support actions in the Security Council if it should ever be threatened by nukes.
In 1994, this seemed like a good deal. The cold war was over, Ukraine likely did have more urgent spending priorities than a nuclear weapon program and the rest of the world, both the nuclear powers and the others were glad to keep the number of nuclear powers limited. Wars of conquest seemed a thing of the past. While the US engaged in some regime change operations (most of which turned out rather terrible, tbh), in the 1990s the idea to expand your territory through war seemed basically dead.
The rule-based world order was a higher, better equilibrium, just like most people would prefer to live in a country where weapons of war are controlled only by a small group of mostly decent people to living in some failed state where many people carry an assault weapon for the simple reason that many other people carry an assault weapon.
Putin's invasion made some serious cracks in that vision of a rule-based world order (which was always perceived to be strong in Europe), but Trump II basically broke it. Under Trump, the US can not be relied to punish defectors from the rule based system, and might not even relied to provide nuclear retaliation for nuclear attacks on NATO members.
The best time for Ukraine to restart their nuclear weapons program would have been when Russia defected from the Budapest Memorandum by annexing Crimea in 2014, before Russia was ready for a full scale invasion. I think it would have been technically feasible. An experienced Soviet nuclear weapons engineer who was 40 in 1990 would have been 64 in 2014. Ukraine also runs a lot of civilian nuclear reactor and has its own Uranium deposits (which would come in handy once they quit the NPT, because this might make acquiring fuel on the world market difficult). WP claims they even have enrichment plants.
In general, figuring out how to make nuclear weapons is something which took a good fraction of the world's geniuses in the 1940s, but has become much simpler since then. Getting an implosion device to work just right is something which would likely be helped a lot by high speed cameras and microelectronics, and a few decades of Moore's law likely makes a hell of a difference for simulations. Delivery systems might be a bit harder, but at the end of the day you don't need 100% reliability for deterrence to work. Even if your enemy is 50% confident that they can intercept the delivery, that still leaves the expected outcome of a nuclear exchange highly negative for them. Attacking a launch site -- conventionally or otherwise -- is forcing your enemy to either use or lose his nukes, and few think it wise to do so.
On a more personal note, I really hate nuclear weapons, and very much prefer the rule-based world order. I very much preferred the 2010s when Putin was mostly known for riding topless, as well as the odd murder of a journalist or dissident, the US was fine playing world police (which included some ill-advised military adventures, but also providing nuclear deterrence for NATO) and I was comfortably regarding nukes, NATO and large scale wars with the same distant horror I might have for medieval healthcare.
Even besides Ukraine, in the future Europe can not rely on the US for defense, and the UK and France arsenals might not be judged sufficient for deterrence, and some EU nuke might be called for. I am not sure how it would work. Classical EU commission manner, where 27 member states have to push the launch button and Orban can veto if he feels like it? Or give Mrs van-der-Leyen launch authority? Or simply have a common weapon program and distribute the spoils to 27 members?
The problem with Team America: World Police is that it requires America to be vastly more powerful than anyone else, forever. Not only is playing world police unpopular in large chunks of America, but it's pretty unpopular with anyone who isn't in direct need of its protection because it requires that America stomp down any potential rivals.
Speaking as a (west) German here, the past eighty years under the hegemony of the US were by far the best we had in our history, anywhere in terms of peace and prosperity. Losing WW2 was the only good thing Hitler ever did for Germany. Anyone can see that large colonial empires have become a net negative. Sure, one requires resources such as rare earth elements for the tech stuff, but the real money is in building the tech, not in mining minerals.
I think that the other European former superpowers are mostly on the same page with us, there. "Hey, remember our glory days when we ruled a colonial empire and our men were always fighting in some war far away or even in Europe or dying of malaria so we could have cheap cotton and rum and tea?"
What exactly is the US doing to prevent China from becoming a peer power? The CHIPS act? Allying with other SE Asian countries to prevent China from invading? These seem strategies for delaying China becoming a peer power rather than preventing it, and don't seem very objectionable to me as far as side effects are concerned.
The strategies the US could employ to prevent them from becoming a peer power, such as invading or nuking them are thankfully far out of the Overton window (or at least were under Biden).
If your argument is that a unified German state, which has never existed before 1871, cannot be counted on to uphold peace and prosperity for her citizenry and European neighbours in the long term, what is your assessment of Berlin's current political line, namely that Germany should become the center of a new rearming European alliance which is decidedly anti-Russian and also freed from American influence? Because if my assumption is correct, you should be 100% against it.
This is decidedly hard to credit though. Germany is, without hyperbole and measuring it by the standards of the US, France or Ukraine, militarily incompetent. Our military-industrial complex works mostly on the industry side, and that pretty much only because of the export market. The Bundeswehr is barely even a paper tiger and anything touched by the ministry of defence is a bottomless hole of graft.
The current rearmament rhetorics are driven by a political desire to capitalize on anti-Trump and pro-Ukraine sentiments, not by any desire to actually increase the ability of Germany or Europe to wage war. The politicians involved in this latest trend have no interest in, stomach for or indeed resources to spend on rearmament. To be sure they might shake loose a few billion euros in new debt to burn in the name of defence, but that'll be the end of it.
Most Germans still consider anything remotely military distasteful if not utterly immoral, and would rather sabotage rearmament than support it if ignoring the topic is no longer an option.
Germany cannot be relied on to handle defence; neither its own nor anybody elses.
So what if the Americans or the Ukrainians or the Russians call their bluff?
Americans and Ukrainians: We promise to shovel more money at the problem and maybe even do that, but without any determination to make a material difference.
Russians: We shrug and point at Poland. Their problem, if any. Russians are usually bluffing themselves.
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