This is all a horrible development for the overall future of humanity, but it's the world we live in now. At a minimum hundreds of billions of dollars will be siphoned off from more beneficial uses over the coming decades, and the risk of major accidents will increase. The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.

Almost all of the world's nukes are controlled by aging old dictators or aspiring dictators who are surrounded by sycophants and treat competence as much less important than personal loyalty. Geopolitical risks are only going to increase as these rulers become more erratic and demented.

I hope my state is because the alternative is being at the whim of the powerful nuclear states around us in a political climate of rising authoritarianism.

Of course, it has later been argued that by entering into various more or less hidden agreements with the US, we made ourselves nuclear targets anyway, with no formal guarantees whatsoever to show for it...

insane we're back here.

The Domestic Politics of Nuclear Choices — A Review Essay by Elizabeth N. Saunders (pdf) - https://profsaunders.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/saunders...

Any country (this includes both democracies and petty dictatorships) which wishes to be safe and independent must get nukes and means of delivery now.

We're in crazy-town because of Trump and the Republicans, with very real consequences.

What is not discussed well is delivery systems, which we are lacking for second strike capability… submarines or complex siloes?

My only wish for the program is that we keep the capability within our control to prevent political overhead and give the current government the ability to destroy the current capabilities at a moment’s notice in case the following govt seems irresponsible. Who knows what we will look like in 200years.

Russia will be prepared to launch another attack in just a few years after the war on Ukraine ends and the US cannot be relied upon.

In fact, it's even worse as the US may end up as the enemy!

Building and maintaining an air defense system that protects your nuclear arsenal unless you own thousands of km airspace as buffer is much harder: Look at Pakistan.

Israel is special in the sense that: 1. All its enemies are underarmed. 2. The US acts as additional deterrent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsMcAvAITjk

Even if tomorrow they decided to actual work together and invest in their own capabilities it would be decades before they would be free of the US defense sector and they know it and it's why they are so resistant to the idea. I think you would need to see more aggression by the Russians combined with substantially more shenanigans by the US (more than just bombastic announcements for the sake of grabbing media attention) for that to change because you are talking about trillion dollar investment, every year, for decades to walk a different path.

There are two ways to make a bomb: either using weapons grade uranium (like the Hiroshima bomb) or weapons grade plutonium (like the Nagasaki bomb). The first requires uranium enrichment facilities and the second requires spent fuel reprocessing facilities. No such facilities exits in the Nordic countries, and both are stupendously complex. You can't just wave a want and build them. And certainly not in a clandestine way (which the author does not actually propose). If they start on this path, maybe, maybe, their own population would accept, but it's unlikely the population of other countries would accept too. Lots of the parts and raw materials needed for these facilities will need to be imported, the Nordic countries can't simply build the entire supply chain, no matter how rich they are per capita. The access to some of that upstream supply chain will be curtailed, because other countries are either strategic adversaries (Russia, China) or democracies where a large fraction of the population opposes nuclear armament. Add to that that some of the key scientists and engineers involved in such a project could be the target of assassinations (oh, wait, Russia would never do that, would it?).

They gave up their nukes to be betrayed. There will be A LOT of new countries with nukes soon because of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...

Everything is service or finance economy now. Nobody cares about science sadly (me included).

It's all Netflix & TikTok, Foodora scrolling until the end now.

Edit: to be more clear: I can't believe that after 4 fucking years, a hostile nation is still permitted to wage war against a sovereign country.

If they don't have a sufficient secret stock pile of nuclear weapons already, then they have been utter and total fools.

If they don't have secret nuclear weapons in orbit, they have been severely irresponsible.

Let's hope the plans of their leaders is not to send all young men as infantry to the meat grinder to die for a country which hates them, like they are doing in the Ukraine war. But who knows? Life is full of surprises.

Please read Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book by Annie Jacobsen that discusses the insanity of nuclear war.