Ghalibaf says no talks under threat, warns of new ‘battlefield cards’

Exactly. That’s what makes all the posturing sound so fake. Neither side wants to admit what this actually looked like, so now it’s all chest-thumping and face-saving.

They were Russias in that all the military launch controls were in Russian USSR, so never did a part of the USSR outside of Russian USSR have the controls to launch the missiles?

If the US stationed nukes in Oklahoma and Oklahoma seceded, they would still be the US’s nukes. Your assertion is clearly wrong given that all the major powers at the time wanted the nukes returned to Russia. 

Of course I know that. They built a bunch of the rockets and a ton of the hardware. But still, the arming mechanism was(is) cryptographically locked. The flight paths to the Western cities were calculated and saved to tape in Moscow and would need complete reprogramming, the launch on detect sensors had no control centres, the comms network would need rebuilding and a complete command and control infra would need to be put into place. None of this is impossible, but it's not easy and not something that could be done overnight. It would have taken a good year or two of very clear "hey, we're getting ready to be able to use nukes" signals. Existing nuclear powers were strongly against having more in the club. It wasn't just Russia. START I had wiped out tons of missiles. Ukraine gaining them would be against the Zeitgeist of the time by a massive amount. But the main driver was the tactical nukes. Ukraine had thousands of things like nuke shells, backpacks, landmines. The big fear was that with the USSR going south these would be sold on, and suddenly we'd have a few thousands nukes that could appear anywhere on the planet at any time and wipe out towns or suburbs. The backpacks were up to 1KT. After the fun and games of Afghanistan, Iran, etc and funding dodginess, ME Terror was growing. The US was just as anxious as Russia to get those weapons out of Ukraine's hands.