A modest proposal: Why stop at nukes?

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

The article Ukraine Expects to Get All the Western Weapons It Wants by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post) quotes Yury Sak, an advisor to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, who is

“[…] confident Ukraine will get everything it wants. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he said.”

Hiroshima Mushroom CloudBut why stop at nuclear weapons? That doesn’t make any sense, does it? It certainly doesn’t gel with the argument that we must do anything we can to help Ukraine win their war against Russia.

How does that not include nuclear weapons? Are we not serious about helping? If we’re really on Ukraine’s side, shouldn’t we let them benefit from the deterrent effect of having nuclear weapons? In the worst case, they would be able to retaliate against a potential Russian attack, no?

Are we chicken?[1]

Or … do we not support them that way? Do we only support them in a hopeless war of attrition with conventional weapons? If we really believe in Ukraine as much as and for the reasons that we say that we do, then we should avail them of the same weapons that prevent us from invading Russia outright.

We did it for Israel, why not Ukraine?

[1]

For the irony-impaired who are in an outright panic, the title of this short essay is taken from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, an essay that suggested,

“[…] that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to rich gentlemen and ladies.”

It was satirical hyperbole—also known as reductio ad absurdum—a category in which this essay attempts to be included, with success that can only be judged by the reader.

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