I can't speak for what the OP intended, but I would consider that having aging nuclear weapons in a country with a possibly unhinged dictator who has an expansionist agenda is the result of not taking nuclear armageddon seriously.
What the fuck was the rest of the world supposed to do, invade Russia? How is swiftly and expressly causing nuclear war the correct way to prevent nuclear war?
A country going through turmoil is less likely to assign a high priority in keeping weapons safely maintained and under control.
If we took nuclear armageddon seriously as an existential threat to humanity, then this issue would have been dealt with much earlier - most likely when the wall came down.
A lot of diplomatic efforts were made at the time. Ukraine was convinced to hand over their nukes, in exchange for security guarantees (that went well...) And in reality, the amount of US/Russian nuclear weapons was reduced during that period (mostly tactical)
But imagine us 20 years into the future. 6% inflation for two decades has made the US deficit unwieldable. The dollar is no longer the international reserve money. The US has tripled its debt since 2023, and has defaulted.
China is very anxious and demand the US abandon nuclear weapons in return for financial aid and debt-forgiving. What do you think is going to happen?
You're never going to get someone suffering from acute loss-of-empire to give up all of their nukes.
This is such an insanely retrospective analysis that you either alienate or lose anyone who would want to agree to your message. Yeah, 30 years later we can see the effect of a slightly "lax" global nuclear policy after isolating a single point in time that catalyzed several historical invasions from then to present day, but "just taking it seriously" isnt a discussion. Any pathway we could have taken from that moment could have easily escalated any numerous amount of tensions, plenty of which have completely lost any hint of understanding their contexts. Pretending that taking the path you can justify as the solution to our problems NOW is a few steps away from prompting others to write historical fanfiction, but I'd probably rather you spent time with chatgpt amusing those curiosities.
