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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 International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.
We are much more causality adverse than we were. The D-Day invasion alone cost something like 5,000 men, and that was a single battle in a four year war effort. We wouldn’t tolerate such losses today. When 2,000 died over the course of a year in the occupation of Iraq, people in congress started calling for an end to the war. A large scale war like WW2 would mean an Iraq war level of causalities twice a day.
And we are much much more adverse to “bad images on TV syndrome”. Show the leaders pictures of sad children, flattened buildings, or crying women, and we lose sight if the objective. It’s why the Hamas tactics were so effective. If you can hide among civilians, forcing your enemies to destroy civilians and houses, temples, and city streets, the west will take your side. Knowing this, you effectively can neutralize the enemy’s ability to defeat you by causing the BITV syndrome— they won’t fight if it means that people at home will be seeing women cry, because the civilians running the military won’t stand for it. So you either go in with small teams and hope you get lucky, or they win.
It really made sense after WWII when the US was 50% of the world's GDP, had fighter jets while most of the world was technologically barely in the 1800s and had nukes.
The US portion of global GDP and population has steadily been falling as the rest of the world has been catching up. China has greater industrial output than the US and are not a century behind the US in tech, in fact they are a head in certain fields. Other countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia etc have developed at a far faster rate than the US. In 1950 the US was the sole supplier of many industrial goods, today the reliance on American products is reduced as there are alternative suppliers for most products.
Invading countries is substantially harder today than it was in the past. Britain could take a quarter of the world, no country could hold that much territory today. Defensive technology is simply too good. Even Houthi rebels have ballistic anti ship missiles.
The US won't be able to maintain its status as an exceptional unipolar hegemon in a world in which the US isn't as exceptional. The US might be more powerful than a specific country but isn't powerful enough to be everywhere at once. They simply can't enforce a world order globally. They can enforce it in a subset of the world but the US would be stretched thin trying to enforce it everywhere at once.
I agree with your overall point but I think you have this mixed up slightly - the problem is not that defensive technology is too good but precisely the opposite. Anti-missile technology hasn't advanced to the same degree as missile technology, and there's now a significant advantage on the offensive side. There are only hypothetical defence systems against the newest round of hypersonics (which the US doesn't even have), and this is going to cause a major shift in wars - it means that incredibly expensive floating targets protected by sophisticated anti-missile systems can be taken down and defeated by far less expensive offensive technologies.
What makes this even worse for any nations who invested vast sums of money into expensive and now obsolete-against-peer-competitor technologies is that those expensive technologies now have political constituencies who will aggressively advocate for more money to be poured into them, preventing any kind of adaptation or shift until serious consequences have already shown up.
I think this is a little overstated. All ICBMs are "hypersonic" but we've had defenses against them for decades. And I think you can [technically speaking] shoot down hypersonic glide vehicles (the newest and coolest thing) in the boost phase fairly easily, and probably in the terminal phase as well, and the US has pretty good methods for achieving this (basically, airborne radars that can guide Standard missiles from ships or planes to hit targets over the horizon).
There's also no reason to think that soft-kill systems wouldn't work on hypersonics that I can think of.
My point here isn't that hypersonics aren't pretty scary, but I think they degrade existing missile defenses rather than render them futile.
That's why I said newest round of hypersonics. Yes, we have defences against the older version of the technology - but I don't think asking the Russians to only use the old missiles that we can intercept instead of the new ones we can't is going to work terribly well.
Depends on the type of system to be quite honest. Maybe there's some classified technology that will do the job, but there's nothing publicly available to the best of my knowledge.
Existing missile defenses are also vulnerable to spoofing attacks and large numbers of decoy missiles - this is just another nail in the coffin.
Here, here's the head of the US Missile Defense Agency saying that we can use the SM-6 (in production since 2013) against the new maneuvering hypersonics.
I don't think (and I think Admiral Hill would agree with me) that it's a comfortable capability, and the US is working on other tech to better handle the threat. But as I said, I think it's an overstatement to say there's zero defense against even the newest hypersonics.
Well, if you're just trying to strike a land target, you can just use inertial or celestial navigation and it will likely work fairly well and you might not need to worry about soft-kill systems. But if you are trying to hit a ship or other maneuvering object (which is part of the attraction of hypersonics, they are fast), you usually use radar or IR/visual guidance, all of which can be soft-killed.
You mean against the OLD maneuvering hypersonics. There's two years and change between this announcement and the demonstration of the Oreshnik.
The SM6, to the best of my knowledge, was used to defend Israeli shipping efforts from the Houthi's rocket attacks, and the result is that Israel's most prominent port went bankrupt because the US was unable to deter the Houthis from blowing up and attacking shipping vessels. If it can't stop the Houthis I have significant doubts about its ability to stop the far more advanced Russians. I'm sure the US is working on other tech to better handle the threat, and I'm sure that one day the technology will be capable of stopping what the Russians can do right now. That's not going to be much use in a conflict that takes place before the US manages to catch up, and who knows how long that will take?
I freely admit ignorance as to how a soft-kill system would work here, so I'll just take your word for it that they'd be able to stop some missiles - but I don't think they'll be able to stop enough missiles to make strikes with large enough numbers to get through uneconomical.
Seems inferior to the Avengard in capabilities to me (lower reported top speed, right, and apparently not a maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicle but rather "just" a MIRV), do you think otherwise?
We've been discussing the technical capabilities of interception. My understanding is that the US Navy intercepted quite a few of the Houthis' rockets. I believe the Houthis' success over the US military is not in the technical realm but rather in the fact that they are using cheap weapons in great quantities. Similarly, the Russians are overwhelming Ukrainian air-defense right now using, basically, mass-produced flying lawnmowers. All of this has little bearing on the technical feasibility of an intercept (but is obviously extremely important when it comes to the question of how to economically wage a war.)
Yes, soft-kill is interesting because it could fail entirely or it could work nearly 100% of the time. Against a radar-guided weapon you could jam it or you could use decoys and chaff that either mimic or mask the ship. Against a visual/IR weapon you could steam into a fogbank or, if no fogbank is available, you could attempt to blind the seekerhead with a laser weapon. These are deployed en masse on helicopters but I don't think onboard ships. I imagine the reason for this is because most anti-ship seekerheads are radar-guided, although some of the newer Western systems (like the LRASM and NSM) have visual/IR sensors.
It's anybody's guess how effective these systems are but it's hard to hit what you can't see.
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