H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-29 on Budjeryn, Inheriting the Bomb63 min read

By discussing the history of the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, Mariana Budjeryn’s book offers a significant contribution to the literature on Russia’s war on Ukraine. The author elegantly discusses Russia’s ambition to become the only nuclear successor state to the Soviet Union and how this goal led to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Additionally, the book portrays Ukraine in the context of its strategic culture, providing insight into the country’s self-identification and decisionmaking.

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Roundtable Review 16-29 

Mariana Budjeryn. Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781421445380.

28 March 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-29 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Elisabeth Roehrlich
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany S. Keenan

 

Review by Valeriia Hesse, Odesa Center for Nonproliferation (OdCNP) 8

Review by Mark Kramer, Harvard University. 14

Review by Anna-Mart van Wyk, University of Johannesburg. 20

Response by Mariana Budjeryn, Harvard Kennedy School 23

 

By discussing the history of the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, Mariana Budjeryn’s book offers a significant contribution to the literature on Russia’s war on Ukraine. The author elegantly discusses Russia’s ambition to become the only nuclear successor state to the Soviet Union and how this goal led to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Additionally, the book portrays Ukraine in the context of its strategic culture, providing insight into the country’s self-identification and decisionmaking.

Three appreciative and distinguished reviewers, Mark Kramer, Anna-Mart van Wyk, and Valeriia Hesse, reflect upon the events of the early 1990s, which are still relevant to conceptions of nonproliferation norms and the relevance of deterrence. In this regard, Budjeryn addresses a question that many scholars have pondered: could Ukraine have retained Soviet nuclear weapons that were deployed on its territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union?[1]Inheriting the Bomb provides an answer, much like the previously published Ukraine’s Nuclear History: A Non-Proliferation Perspective, published by Springer in 2022.[2] The reviewers compliment Budjeryn for her “interviews with key participants,” and use of “previously unavailable archival material,” which, according to Mark Kramer, allow the author to add much to the historical record on Ukraine’s decision to forgo nuclear weapons.

Budjeryn smoothly opens the book with 1991, the year when the USSR collapsed, and highlights the historical incidents that influenced the global security landscape at that time. She argues that the August coup of the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP), which caused Soviet President Gorbachev to temporarily lose control over the Soviet nuclear arsenal (42), was a turning point in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and resulted in the emergence of four nuclear states. This argument is tremendously strong.

In the strategic domain, Ukraine played a unique role in the family of the Soviet republics, as it was a crucial part of the nuclear deterrence industrial base of the Soviet Union (36). However, Kyiv’s understanding of nuclear weapons as a valuable asset developed over time. Anna-Mart van Wyk agrees with Budjeryn’s claim that Ukraine’s desire for a non-nuclear status was motivated by the trauma that followed the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. The need to acquire a “civilized divorce” from Moscow also played a significant role (127). Van Wyk also concludes that Kyiv’s quick change from the renunciation to the policy of “ownership and deterrence…was prompted by an awareness that Russia was disparaging Ukraine’s right to self-determination.”

Budjeryn argues that Ukraine’s position began to change when it aspired to become a legal state successor of the Soviet Union (133, 153). According to the Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties from 1978, Ukraine had all the reasons to be considered a full successor, along with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Even so, Russia categorically denied this (200). Furthermore, on this issue, Moscow gained full solidarity from the United States, who preferred to see the dissolution of the USSR as a “Yugoslavia with nukes” (46). Therefore, Washington “did not deem it necessary to…depend on the ‘legal theories’ of the state succession” when dealing with nuclear issues (72). Mark Kramer agrees that this significant fact explains why Ukraine ultimately had “the limited nature of the options” at that time. The main point of great powers was to exclude non-Russian republics from the pool of the legitimate nuclear successors of the Soviet Union. For example, both Russia and the US (under Bush administration) resisted making Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan full-fledged participants in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1), signed by the US and USSR in July 1991, aimed at the reduction of the Soviet and American strategic nuclear arsenals. Later, the treaty was separately signed by Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan (the latest 3 as non-nuclear states) as the republics where Soviet strategic nuclear arms were deployed. The US eventually introduced the Lisbon Protocol as a reasonable solution, which permitted Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear states while ratifying START, which was necessary to manage further nuclear dismantlement (151). Initially, Ukraine failed to follow through with the mission to disarm its Soviet-inherited nuclear weapons for a combination of reasons that range from its claim to be one of the USSR’s legal successors to its plans to retain strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS), of which it had been the world’s largest producer (36). Budjeryn’s book, however, presents two different stories.

One story is about the fate of the tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) that were a matter of particular concern for Russia. Ukraine was obliged to transfer all of the TNWs to Russia by May 1992, according to the Belavezha Accords and Almaty protocol treaties signed in December 1991, which signified the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, the first months of Ukraine’s independence witnessed the suspension of the TNWs transfer, and Budjeryn explains this by pointing to the growing contradictions of Russia and Ukraine over the Black Sea fleet and the Russian ambitions for Crimea as its own territory (145).

Debating the possibilities of Ukraine establishing its own nuclear deterrence, the important question here is how reliable the permissive action links (PALs) of Soviet TNWs were or whether these weapons could potentially be used against Russia by Ukraine (21). Budjeryn points out the existence of PALs, which were coordinated by the Russian 12th GUMO, the 12th Chief (or “Main”) Directorate of the Ministry of Defense (12 GUMO) of the Soviet Union, and then Russia. Interestingly, some sources emphasize that that PALs were not established for the Ukraine-based TNWs,[3] which explains their criticality as a tool of potential nuclear deterrence for Ukraine. It can also shed light on the decisiveness of Russian generals who, after the suspension of the withdrawal of the TNWs, even threatened that in case if Ukraine kept retaining tactical nukes, “the weapons may be destroyed at their current locations.”[4]

Budjeryn concludes that the lack of control of the Ukrainian president and the parliament over the TNWs led to an unprecedented situation that tactical nukes were withdrawn solely by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, which was under the heavy influence from Russia at that time (149).

The other story in the book concerns strategic nuclear weapons that were not critical from the deterrence standpoint since all operational control remained in Moscow. However, some Ukrainian officials and Verkhovna Rada (the Parliament) considered these weapons valuable for several reasons. First, Yury Kostenko, the leader of the pro-nuclear lobby in Rada, believed that Ukraine’s deployed strategic nuclear weapons, though non-operational, provided the state’s territory with more security than it could expect without them (166). Indeed, Russian ambitions for Crimea were powerful at that time as well as the pressure of Moscow over the Black Sea Fleet, so Ukraine was determined to exchange its nuclear arsenal for meaningful security guarantees from all key international players.

The second is the struggle of Ukraine to be recognized as a legal successor of the Soviet Union, which was one of the reasons explaining the scandalous “partial ratification” of START-1 by the Verkhovna Rada in November 1993. Ukraine ratified the Treaty on the same conditions as Russia and the US and thus pledged to forgo only part of its nuclear and missile arsenals. However, this only happened after Article 5 of the Lisbon Protocol, which had obliged Ukraine to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state, was crossed out. This amendment paved the way for Ukraine’s ratification of the Treaty (206).

The third reason is that Ukraine had the most significant ICBM industry in the world. For example, the construction bureau Pivdenne and Pivdenmash plant, which together with the other infrastructure (such as the Pavlograd machine-building plant, the Khartron enterprise) had produced 70 percent of the Soviet ICBMs, including those which were equipped with the multiple independently re-entered vehicles (MIRVs) that could carry 6-10 nuclear warheads, such as the SS-18s, SS-24s, and navigation systems for SS-19. According to the provisions of the START-1, which was signed when Ukraine was still a part of the whole Soviet Strategic industry, Ukrainian enterprises received the major part of the state order to produce heavy ICBMS. After the collapse of the USSR, this argument motivated the Ukrainian missile industry lobby initially to confront nuclear disarmament as it was believed that non-nuclear state would not be able to remain a missile producer for the nuclear state (Russia) as it was suggested by the START-1 provisions. The START-2 Treaty, however, was mainly designed by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cut off the Ukrainian missile industry; therefore, it codified Russia’s refusal of the MIRVed ICBMs (189), which led to the loss of the rationale for keeping nuclear weapons, together with missiles which considered to be the part of the “nuclear weapons” notion as means of their delivery. This situation triggered the decision to give up nuclear weapons as the main precondition of joining the Missile Technologies Control Regime (MTCR). The main aim of this was to enable the survival of the missile industry by Ukraine joining the MTCR to be able to convert to space technologies (215).

Bujeryn convincingly argues that nuclear disarmament results from a combination of multicausal factors, including domestic and international ones. The latter is primarily associated with two drivers. The first stems from the determination of US leaders to allow only one nuclear state to emerge as the successor to the Soviet Union.  Russia, which retained operational control over nuclear weapons, communication hotlines, and the nuclear industry, occupied the favored position (232). Van Wyk argues that the NPT terms and conditions were created “as a strategy to concentrate geopolitical power in the two superpowers,” and that they therefore contributed to Russia with the US support being the winner on the nuclear heritage dispute with Ukraine. The second driver was the strong legacy of the NPT regime, which “provided the framework for nuclear possession and outlined criteria for legitimizing it” (233). The latter did not permit Ukraine to retain the position of “ownership” for nuclear weapons (instead of the accepted by the NPT term “possession”), for which it had initially fought. Here, Valeriia Hesse remarks that Budjeryn’s book makes a significant contribution by recording “important terminology and Ukraine’s agency in the denuclearization processes,” referring to the principal difference between “the popular yet incorrect phrase “the republics returned weapons to Russia” and the author’s “the transfer of weapons to Russia.”

The reviewers all conclude that Inheriting the Bomb explains in a masterly fashion the complexity of internal and external factors, domestic political and economic conditions, as well as historical ties between Russia and Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan that, in total, shaped the denuclearization pattern of the latter states.

Meanwhile, the case of Ukrainian nuclear disarmament also provides a lesson, which is summarized by the author, that Russia’s war against Ukraine could have been very different, or that it might not have started, if Moscow did not have nuclear weapons that provided it with a “nuclear shadow” as a tool of power projection in Ukraine. She writes that “even without public nuclear warnings of Moscow, NATO will not still interfere in the war with nuclear Russia over Ukraine” (239). The other side of this coin is what might happen to a state that is not protected by nuclear deterrence (239). A different scenario involves a non-nuclear weapon state being attacked by a nuclear weapon state without fear of punishment, either by its non-nuclear opponent or the international community. Furthermore, the fear of nuclear escalation dictates that the West must avoid direct confrontation with Russia and also determines what type of weapons it may or may not supply to Ukraine to enable its defense against the Russian war of aggression. “Even if Ukraine wins,” concludes Budjeryn, “the cost of victory in lost lives will be staggering” (239).

Collectively, these reviews give us additional reason to immerse in Inheriting the Bomb, which is well written and based on a deep reading in the literature. It is thus recommended not only for experts in the field but also for a broader audience which is interested in exploring, in Kramer’s words, “the all-too-rare process of denuclearization” and understanding why and how Ukraine abandoned the most robust tool of power in a world that is still based on the rules of nuclear deterrence.

Contributors:

Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Project on Managing the Atom (MTA). She is the recipient of the 2024 William E. Colby Military Writers’ Award for Inheriting the Bomb, the first female to win the award in its 25-year history. Formerly, she held appointments as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, and a visiting professor at Tufts University and at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana is a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academies of Sciences and a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is a fellow with the Global Europe Program.

Polina Sinovets is a Founder and a Head of Odesa Center for Nonproliferation (OdCNP), Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine). As an Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations, Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University, she teaches courses on the role of nuclear weapons, arms control, and deterrence in world politics. She is the author and co-author of multiple publications on the nuclear weapons policy of the US and Russia, nuclear deterrence, strategic stability, and European security in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, NATO Defense College Research Papers, Nonproliferation Review, Slavic Journal of Military Studies, as well as an author and the editor of Ukraine’s Nuclear History: A Non-Proliferation Prospective (Springer, 2022), Arms Control and Europe: New Challenges and Prospects for Strategic Stability (Springer, 2022), and Russia’s War on Ukraine: The Implication for the Global Nuclear Order (Springer, 2023).

Iryna Maksymenko is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations, Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine), as well as a Deputy Head and Senior Researcher of Odesa Center for Nonproliferation (OdCNP), Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University, where she is responsible for Ukrainian and European security issues and the educational dimension of OdCNP activity. She is the author and co-author of publications devoted to European security and stability, Ukraine and the Black Sea security, including Ukraine’s Nuclear History: A Non-Proliferation Prospective (Springer, 2022), Arms Control and Europe: New Challenges and Prospects for Strategic Stability (Springer, 2022); Nuclear Security in Ukraine and the Black Sea Region: New Threats, New Risks, New Consequences (SIPRI, 2023); Russia’s War on Ukraine: The Implication for the Global Nuclear Order (Springer, 2023); and The Impact of Russia’s Propaganda on Security Perceptions in Romania and Bulgaria (European Political Science, 2024).

Valeriia Hesse is a research analyst at Open Nuclear Network (ONN), a non-resident fellow at Odesa Center for Nonproliferation (OdCNP), and a PhD researcher at Central European University (CEU). She has long-standing expertise in nuclear policy. Her recent contributions to edited volumes include: “Russia’s Hybrid Nuclear Compellence: Intentions and Consequences, in Florin-Catalin Cirstoiu, Victor Juc, Corina Pop, Petre Min, Christian Barna, eds., Medical Response Strategy in Case of Radiation Emergency Caused by the War in Ukraine (Springer, 2024); “U-Factor: Russia’s War on Ukraine and the Deterrence vs. Disarmament Discussion. Pragmatic Internationalism,” in Adérito Vicente, Polina Sinovets, and Julien  Theron, eds., Russia’s War on Ukraine. Contributions to Political Science (Springer, 2023); and with Sinovets, “Russia’s Foreign and Security Policy: The Evolution of the Escalation Strategy,” in: Sinovets and William Alberque, eds., Arms Control and Europe. Contributions to International Relations (Springer, 2022).

Mark Kramer is Director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and Director of Harvard’s Sakharov Seminars on Human Rights.

Anna-Mart van Wyk is a nuclear historian and Professor of International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her doctoral thesis investigated the implementation of the 1977 United States arms embargo against South Africa and its impact on US-South African relations. She subsequently went on to specialise in South Africa’s nuclear history, while teaching courses in international conflict and arms control and disarmament. Her multi-national archival research has been published in numerous international publications.

 

Mariana Budjeryn’s Inheriting the Bomb sheds light on events of crucial importance for international security in the early 1990s: the inheritance of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The book’s two main goals are to contribute to the historical record of post-Soviet nuclear disarmament and to add to the broader research on nuclear decisionmaking. Such research is very timely, not only because of the re-invigorated global deterrence versus disarmament debate, in which the two camps argue whether deterrence with nuclear weapons or nuclear disarmament provides for a safer world,[5] but also crucially for informing analyses of potential nuclear weapons proliferation in the current geopolitical circumstances. In the words of Borys Tarasiuk, Ukraine’s chief negotiator of the 1994 Budapest providing security assurance for Ukraine in exchange for its nuclear disarmament: “not only did Russia blatantly violate its commitments…but two other signatories—USA and Great Britain—failed to fulfill their commitments” (229).

This book is an impressive addition to the limited in-depth research on Ukrainian disarmament. While it may seem as though a lot has been written about this topic, especially through the memoirs of key figures in the process,[6] these memoirs tend to portray a particular point of view and frequently contain after-the-fact justifications. In the memoir category, the most comprehensive example is Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History by Yurii Kostenko.[7] This book has many primary sources embedded in part or in full and is styled like an encyclopedia. It offers more insight into what Ukraine put into consideration in the disarmament process, for example, the cost of nuclear materials and local production. Beside Inheriting the Bomb, there is only one other academic book that addresses the issue of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament extensively: the Odesa Center for Nonproliferation (OdCNP)’s work on Ukraine’s nuclear history.[8] It covers a longer time period and offers considerable data from the early years of nuclear physics research in Ukraine through to the disarmament process, and on to the development of the modern nuclear energy complex. The book provides an extensive overview of Ukraine’s significant contribution to the Soviet nuclear weapons program and its indispensable role.

Since the memoirs provide a great amount of nuance and detail, including personal correspondence and primary documents, they can in themselves serve as sources of information, which Budjeryn has utilized proficiently. Even more importantly, the author made a commendable effort to examine a plethora of mostly untapped international multilingual archives (12) and compiled an impressive list of interviewees over the years of the writing of the book (289-290). The author’s examination of historic media publications that are reflective of the moment adds special value to this very well-sourced book.

The book begins with a prologue and introduction, and is organized into two parts on the topics of “Soviet Nuclear Collapse” and “Ukraine: Negotiating a Nuclear Exception,” followed by a conclusion. The chapters in the first section address the collapse of the Soviet Union as an obsolete and inefficient system and cover how three of the sovereign states that arose from this collapse (Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan) dealt with their nuclear inheritance. This part of the book describes the collapse as a process rather than an event (17-33) and outlines some initial steps taken by the dying beast to withdraw certain sensitive assets from many republics in order to avoid loss of control over the weapons (39). It also guides the reader through the initial US thinking process and immediately focuses attention on the West’s concerns with regard to the dooming dissolution (“loose nukes” and “brain drain”) and the resulting Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (43-51). The part also describes the assets that comprised the Soviet nuclear arsenal on the territories of the three republics (34-38); the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and its Joint Armed Forces, which were supposed to become a solution for managing former Soviet nuclear forces (51-61); and gives a glimpse into the legal debate over Soviet nuclear succession, including succession of Soviet obligations under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START) and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) as a way of insuring that Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan committed to eliminating all nuclear weapons from their territories (62-83). This section finishes by summarizing Belarus and Kazakhstan’s experiences and motivations for disarmament, which were based upon several factors. Both experienced post-Chornobyl nuclear fears and had aspirations to raise their international profiles through disarming. At the same time, Belarus wanted to achieve deeper security commitments from Russia, while Kazakhstan focused on security and economic benefits (84-106).

The second part focuses on Ukraine’s uneasy path from nuclear renunciation to ownership and to final renunciation. It starts with a description of how newly-elected politicians representing Ukraine’s intellectual elite renounced the nuclear weapons, with the Chornobyl tragedy, humanism, and the severing of strategic ties with Russia to gain full independence in mind (109-119). At the time of the Soviet collapse, Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal amounted to the third largest in the world after Russia and the US. Ukraine’s sovereignty aspirations faced a cold reception from the West, which was motivated by the presence of Soviet nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil and “Washington’s persistent Moscowcentrism” (119-127). The section further goes on to describe how the importance of nuclear weapons and this Moscowcentrism of the US turned Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal into a hedge in the state’s achieving a rightful sovereign place in the international community, gaining greater security through guarantees, and obtaining economic benefits (as opposed to liabilities). The insecurity stemmed from Russia’s complete inability and/or unwillingness to recognize the fact of Ukrainian sovereignty and ownership of its military assets. Russia, for example, questioned the subordination of the Black Sea Fleet and Crimea in general, and performed a blatant tactical weapons removal from the Ukrainian territory behind its back (128-150). The conclusion that Ukrainian leaders drew is well-expressed through the words of Major General Tolubko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament (Rada) defense and security committee: “The opinion of the leading world politicians is such that a nonnuclear state cannot expect to be treated seriously” (147). Hence, there was a growing political consensus that Ukraine should not disarm if it were to receive no reward.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) translated the aforementioned consensus into a note to the 1992 Lisbon Protocol stating that “Ukraine, as one of the legal successors of the Soviet Union, had a legitimate right to possess nuclear weapons and having voluntarily renounced that right, insisted on national security guarantees, including the threat of the use of force against Ukraine on the part of any nuclear state” (152). The chapter that follows reflects on the resulting delay in the START-Lisbon package deliberation and ratification. In the process, the Rada created an ad hoc working group on START ratification, headed by Yurii Kostenko, who centered Ukraine’s disarmament around four demands: recognition of Ukraine’s rightful ownership of nuclear weapons; the firm commitment of US technical assistance funds to offset disarmament costs; the return of the extracted material to Ukraine for nuclear industry purposes; and security guarantees (159). These demands infuriated both the Russians and the Americans. At the same time, it was a moderate stance with underlying pragmatic considerations.

In the process of reaching this position, Ukrainian leaders weighed the options of Ukraine being a nuclear state, a nonnuclear state without strategic offensive weapons, and a nonnuclear state with conventionally armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) (165). While they assessed that Ukraine possessed the necessary technology and expertise to close the gaps and obtain all the elements of a nuclear program within three to five years, the financial part of the equation was the biggest challenge for a struggling economy. Furthermore, the author argues that the security situation would most probably have deteriorated through both the US and Russia targeting Ukraine or even striking its nuclear facilities, and the potential following international isolation was not in the plans or preferences of the leadership of the newly-independent republic (166-186). In the meantime, Russia and the US continued worked to form an agreement on Ukraine’s disarmament without Ukrainian officials in the room through the 1993 START II discussions (189).

The book offers an interesting perspective on this frequently overlooked treaty. The chance for Ukraine to be heard appeared with the new Clinton administration in 1993. Russia, which argued that the US should treat its relationship with Ukraine as a “family affair” (i.e. not be involved in it) continued to be the main focus of US officials. The Clinton administration recognized that the previous efforts towards Ukrainian disarmament were counterproductive (192). It started entertaining the new sovereign’s demands, albeit interpreting them to own benefit, while enticing Russia to update its approach as well (193-195). Unfortunately, the narrative does not comprehensively describe the decisionmaking of Ukraine’s leaders, other than noting that it was based on fears that Russia could slip into chaos (201). This part of the book would have benefitted from a deeper dive into Russia’s internal processes. All in all, Ukraine ended up receiving technical assistance funds, compensation for its fissile material and, in addition, some meaningless non-binding security assurances through the 1994 Budapest memorandum that did not provide any commitments beyond pre-existing ones outlined in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The third-largest nuclear arsenal was gone (195-223).

While one can understand the decision to divide the book into the aforementioned two sections, the result is that a significant portion of the information seems a bit redundant and chronologically confusing between the two parts. Given the book’s stated goals, perhaps it would have been more beneficial to mainly focus chronologically on Ukraine’s disarmament in the first section of the book, with the inclusion of a broader look at Ukraine’s overall political and economic processes of the time, and to make the second section a bit smaller with a focus on the commonalities and differences in the disarmament processes and motivations among Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The research methodology is well outlined and implemented in addressing the book’s first goal or providing a historical­­ record; at the same time, it is less precise for the second: research on nuclear decisionmaking (12-13). As a result, while the book includes much evidence that is relevant to decisionmaking, the related concluding summaries and analyses are articulated to varying degrees of explicitness throughout the chapters. Nevertheless, the book’s conclusions center mostly on the second topic. The main finding is that nuclear decisions are multi-causal and are vastly influenced by broader international and domestic contexts (231). At the same time, the conclusion does not offer a reflection by the author on the book’s place in the historiography on the subject.

One of the positive contributions of Inheriting the Bomb is that it records important terminology and Ukraine’s agency in the processes described. For example, instead of employing the popular yet incorrect phrase “the republics returned weapons to Russia,” the author refers to “the transfer of weapons to Russia” (53).[9] The nuclear weapons did not of course originate in Russia: they were Soviet, i.e. a collective effort, and thus could only be transferred, not returned. Regrettably, instead of Chornobyl (the Ukrainian spelling) the author uses Chernobyl (the Russian spelling). The Russian spelling became so widespread because of Russia’s colonial language policies; however, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other international organizations have turned to the official use of the Ukrainian Chornobyl spelling as a sign of respect to the country’s sovereignty.[10]

Among others, the book has one curious and positive attribute. When the reader wonders about the reasons for a certain occurrence mentioned in a chapter, the pages that follow tend to offer exactly the required explanation, and not just a mere description of events. It uses very extensive sources and evidence to provide convincing answers to a lot of the questions about Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament. Additionally, two weaknesses in Ukraine’s position become obvious from the narrative: the absence of precise vision of how to formulate the desired security guarantees, and the absence of attempts to devise pragmatic reasons for why the US should pay attention to Ukraine (that is, how Ukraine could be beneficial to the US) and to articulate them. This most likely stemmed from Ukraine’s fledgling statehood and the fact that the apparatus was not developed enough to make these important steps. Another major contribution of the book involves the bridging of past events with the security situation of today, and focusing readers’ attention on a number of questions for further consideration and research. The biggest attention-grabber is the author’s curiosity to the impact of nuclear possession from a special angle. Budjeryn wonders not so much whether Russia would have invaded if Ukraine was a nuclear weapons state. She raises a very important question of whether Russia would have dared to invade Ukraine if it itself did not have nuclear weapons (239). The question addresses the very problem that Russia created for the nonproliferation regime with its full-scale invasion in utilizing nuclear compellence to shield a conventional aggression.[11]

This review author’s main conclusions after reading the book are that: 1) the pragmatic interests of the powerful dictate the interpretation of global justice and global good and 2) the lack of statehood experience and comprehensive knowledge of key international topics can do much damage to the national interests of a newly independent state. This is where the reviewer’s conclusions from the same evidence diverge from those of the author. Budjeryn offers somewhat conflicting views on the ultimate nature of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament. On the one hand, she refers to the strength of the international nonproliferation norm as having had a serious impact on Ukraine’s disarmament (186), noting that the international nonproliferation regime underpinned the concerted US and Russian stance (38). On the other hand, she argues that the “morality and legality [Ukraine alluded to] proved as naïve as they were ineffectual” (120) and that “[i]f no international nonproliferation regime existed, the United States would have likely mounted an effort to ensure that the non-Russian Soviet successors surrendered nuclear weapons as a matter of policy and national interest” (83). One of the main arguments for disarmament was that if Ukraine were to become a nuclear state, it “would damage Ukraine’s international standing and spell international isolation or even sanctions” (165), which was highly likely. The book offers limited explanation, however, as to why this would have been the case, while not going into detail about the analysis by international law experts—which is referenced in the book itself—of why Ukraine was de facto and de jure a nuclear state (190). One of the very few weaknesses of the book is that it does not dive deeper in the opposing narrative, the logic of which is described, for example, in Yurii Kostenko’s book on Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament.[12]

Instead, the book repeats the US legalistic explanation that “to admit the non-Russian republics to the NPT as nuclear weapons states (NWS) would be to defy the very “object and purpose” of the treaty” (69). This principle is subject to interpretation depending on how one defines proliferation and addresses the “testing before 1 January 1967” rule (82).[13] As the book notes, Ukraine was home to a significant portion of the infrastructure for the Soviet nuclear weapons program and was an active and significant participant in its creation (35-36). It is thus possible to claim that Ukraine conducted nuclear tests as part of the Soviet Union, as on an equal level with Russia. However, “[t]he United States judged…that in such tumultuous times…it was best not to take chances and have the weapons consolidated in Russia” (78). As seen throughout the book, Russia was designated the most important successor state because it was easier for the international community, and the US in particular, to deal with a familiar system. The bipolar system where there is a single key powerful counterpart, whose power and importance was defined by the possession of nuclear weapons. In psychology this phenomenon is called stereotyping and is one of the instincts that helps humans to create patterns and not be overwhelmed by constant uncertainty due to variability.[14] One of the observations that Ukraine rightfully made was that nuclear weapons are crucially important in the world of international politics and were key to getting special attention from the US (153).

The crucial point made by the book is that great powers should be “less arrogant and pay more attention to the agency, the existence, the interests, and security concerns of those outside of the gentlemen’s club” (235). This is all the more pertinent at times when the deal—which came at the expense of the weak and at a low cost to the powerful—gave them a prerogative not only in making it, but also breaking it. Russia readily used this opportunity to invade Ukraine. As Budjeryn shows, Ukraine disarmed because of a combination of various motivations: from the elite’s­­ (and particularly president Leonid Kravchuk’s) idealism; to the historic trauma of Chornobyl accident; and to international political and potentially economic pressure. At the same time, many in military leadership retained close mental ties with Russia, which defined their loyalties. Yet, with a closer look at the evidence provided, one cannot help but see: disarmament decisions came down to the economic argument. Ukraine had a gap analysis of the nuclear weapons complex, which showed that retaining a nuclear deterrent with all its components would be possible with sufficient funds. It is even possible to live through isolation if one’s economy were doing well and/or if they built their own coalition. Take the example of Russia’s further erosion of the nonproliferation norm by cooperating with the DPRK and Iran: all three countries are suffering from economic hardships and isolation due to their rogue international behavior, including challenging the NPT. The international community must remember that the nonproliferation norm exists because it is largely upheld. However, its complete erosion is not unthinkable given what the world has learned about Ukraine: the biggest fear it had when disarming came into reality—Russia killing thousands of Ukrainian citizens in its territorial claims—and the international support for Ukraine, while significant, is very far from NATO’s Article 5 level. Mariana Budjeryn’s Inheriting the Bomb does a terrific job at emphasizing why this is a horrible hit for the nonproliferation regime through her comprehensive historical perspective.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991, after months of growing political, economic, and social instability, came amid the increasingly violent breakup of another multiethnic Communist state, Yugoslavia. The descent into warfare in Yugoslavia in 1991 stirred fears that a similar fate might befall the Soviet Union, where violent clashes had already been cropping up in several republics and regions (Armenia-Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, the Ferghana Valley). The bloodshed in Yugoslavia was tragic, but the potential for a disastrous outcome in the Soviet Union seemed much more ominous because of the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal. The USSR at the time possessed more than 35,000 warheads and bombs, located at various places throughout the country.[15] The security of that arsenal became an overriding concern for Western governments in 1991, especially after an attempted coup in Moscow on 19-21 August was rebuffed. The failure of the coup gravely weakened the vestiges of Soviet rule, raising the prospect of chaotic disintegration.[16]

In the final few months of the USSR’s existence, Western policymakers focused obsessively on ensuring that Soviet nuclear weapons did not fall into the wrong hands.[17] Having been caught off-guard by the rapidity of the Soviet Union’s fragmentation, US and allied officials went to great lengths to prevent a nuclear emergency from arising. In practice this meant that they embraced a Moscow-centric approach, seeking to preserve unified control of the nuclear arsenal instead of pushing for most or all of the soon-to-be independent republics to be given a physical role (and thereby a veto) in nuclear command authority. An arrangement in which multiple republics would have assumed joint command of Soviet nuclear forces would have greatly complicated the procedures for using a nuclear weapon of any kind for any purpose, a situation that presumably would have benefited the entire world, including the former USSR, but at no point did Western officials encourage a collective form of operational control over the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal. Instead, they took for granted that command authority should reside exclusively with leaders in Moscow.[18]

Even though policymakers in the West and in the former USSR pursued their desired outcomes, the pressure of events often necessitated improvisation. By the time the Soviet Union was formally dissolved on 26 December 1991, major parts of the Soviet nuclear arsenal were still located outside the jurisdiction of the newly independent Russian Federation. Command authority of Soviet nuclear forces was consolidated in Moscow (and reinforced by physical devices incorporated in the weapons), but the physical location of the weapons was dispersed. With Western backing, Russian officials sought to transfer all Soviet tactical nuclear weapons to centralized storage sites on Russian territory as quickly as possible, a process that was carried out relatively smoothly and expeditiously, with only a few glitches and delays.[19] However, the dispensation of Soviet intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was bound to be much more complicated, prolonged, and expensive. After the Soviet Union broke apart, Soviet ICBMs were still deployed at launch sites in four newly independent countries: the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.[20]

Mariana Budjeryn’s excellent book guides readers through the complex story of how all Soviet nuclear forces (ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles [SLBMs], heavy bombers, and tactical nuclear weapons) were eventually brought under the physical control of the Russian Federation. Most of the events she discusses occurred thirty-odd years ago, but the repercussions are still with us today.[21] On many occasions since February 2022, officials in Moscow have threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine as part of Russia’s broader military campaign to subjugate the country. The evidence suggests that these threats are mostly shrill bluster rather than genuine statements of intent, but Russia’s ability to engage in nuclear coercion nowadays is a direct result of the events in the 1990s that are deftly chronicled by Budjeryn.

The book, as its subtitle suggests, focuses mostly on the case of Ukraine, but Budjeryn also includes an illuminating chapter about Belarus and Kazakhstan, showing why the denuclearization process in these two countries was smoother than in Ukraine.[22] One of the major strengths of the book is the new information Budjeryn has gleaned from interviews with key participants; from memoirs (especially the extraordinary account by Yurii Kostenko);[23] from declassified documents stored at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, and at the Bill Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas; from the invaluable collection of Vitalii Kataev’s papers at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Archives; and from documents in the two main state archives in Moscow and Kyiv. The only gap seems to be some assessments and reports produced in the early 1990s by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that are now available in the agency’s online reading room (and also at the US National Archives reading room in College Park, Maryland). Having published an in-depth analysis of the Ukrainian case a quarter century ago, I am delighted to see how much Budjeryn is able to add to the historical record based on the crucial information she amassed.[24] Her account is as close to definitive as we are likely to get.

As Budjeryn points out, Ukraine in December 1991 inherited 46 SS-24 ICBMs, 130 SS-19 ICBMs, and 45 Bear-H and Blackjack heavy bombers equipped with roughly 600 nuclear-armed AS-15 air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs). The Ukrainian government soon asserted “administrative” control over these weapons, and Ukrainian troops were sent to guard the bases.[25] At no time, however, did Ukraine have operational command of any of the nuclear armaments. From the late 1960s on, the Soviet government kept its nuclear forces under highly centralized control in Moscow, both physically and procedurally. After the Soviet Union disintegrated, operational control remained solely in Moscow. Ukrainian physicists, chemists, and engineers had worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons program, and some returned to Ukraine after 1991.[26] Ukraine had technicians who could help with regular servicing and upkeep of the ICBMs and missile silos on Ukrainian territory. Nonetheless, proper maintenance necessitated additional highly trained personnel. Hence, from an early stage, Russian specialists played a key role in upkeep of the missile silos. One of the ironies of the presence of ex-Soviet strategic nuclear forces on Ukrainian territory is that Ukraine was partly reliant on Russians to make sure that everything was safe.

Budjeryn rightly emphasizes the importance of domestic politics and economic conditions in shaping the policies of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Traumatic experiences with nuclear power in all three republics—the adverse impact of the Chornobyl accident in Ukraine and Belarus in 1986 and the environmental damage caused by four decades of nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk in northern Kazakhstan—ensured that public opinion in all these places was decidedly anti-nuclear in the final years of the Soviet regime. That helps explain why the initial inclination in all three countries was to embrace a non-nuclear position. In Kazakhstan and Belarus, that position did not waver, but in Ukraine domestic political hijinks stirred vacillations and unease.

Budjeryn shows how key figures in the Ukrainian parliament, such as Kostenko, helped to foster uncertainty about the ultimate outcome. Democratic elections also mattered. The election of Leonid Kuchma as president of Ukraine in July 1994 in place of Leonid Kravchuk brought into office a leader who was more willing to strike deals with Russia over various matters. (In Belarus as well, the election of Alyaksandr Lukashenka in place of Stanislau Shushkevich as president in January 1994 reinforced Belarus’s commitment to yield all nuclear weapons, though the matter was much less controversial than in Ukraine.[27]) Political decisions were also influenced by economic realities. Severe economic constraints in Ukraine in the first half of the 1990s gave Western countries (and Russia) greater leverage in urging the Ukrainian government to relinquish its weapons in return for economic benefits and security assurances. Although economic conditions alone were not determinative, they facilitated the emergence and eventual acceptance of a deal.

The book convincingly depicts the international context in which the drama was taking place. The international nuclear nonproliferation regime, with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as its centerpiece, was of particular importance during some of the more contentious debates. The escalating warfare in Yugoslavia, moving from Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 to Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1992 and after, was the backdrop for all events discussed here, inducing a degree of caution among the participants. In contrast to the hostile posturing and bellicosity of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 2010s and 2020s, Russian leaders in the first half of the 1990s were actually interested in cooperating with the United States and other Western countries. In many ways it was a different world. But what also comes across is the limited nature of the options Ukraine ultimately had. Kravchuk’s proposal in early 1993 for a Baltic-to-the-Danube constellation was largely stillborn, and even though Ukraine eagerly signed up to the newly created Partnership for Peace (PfP, an initiative of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in February 1994 and took part in many PfP activities and military exercises, these brought no concrete guarantees for Ukrainian security.

Budjeryn explains, as others have, why there was good reason for Ukraine to have yielded the nuclear weapons on its territory.[28] The notion (sometimes still heard nowadays) that Ukraine could simply have kept the ICBMs and ALCMs and emerged as the world’s third-largest nuclear weapons state is a myth. Ukraine lacked operational control of the weapons, and even though the Ukrainian government might have enlisted former nuclear weapons scientists and technicians to try to circumvent the physical safeguards on the weapons and extract fissile material from the warheads, such attempts would have encountered formidable technical and political obstacles. The nuclear warhead fabrication facilities needed to produce usable nuclear weapons were all in Russia. Ukraine would have had to build its own facilities if it had wanted to acquire an independent, functional, and reliable nuclear arsenal. Worthwhile though such a program might have been, it would have been inordinately expensive, would have damaged relations with the United States and other Western countries, and would have risked a preemptive Russian attack on Ukraine’s program. It is not difficult to see why Ukrainian leaders decided not to go down that route.

Another myth that can now be put to rest is the notion that Ukrainian leaders were misled about the “assurances” they received under the Budapest Memorandum signed by Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and Great Britain in December 1994.[29] Publicly available sources at the time made clear that Ukrainian government officials and parliamentarians understood perfectly well that the Budapest memorandum was far short of an ironclad guarantee.[30] They were fully aware that the document went no further than the commitments undertaken by the United States, Britain, and the USSR many years earlier in the NPT, the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the United Nations Charter. Even a pledge not to engage in “economic coercion” was merely a word-for-word restatement of a provision in the Helsinki Final Act.

Initially, Ukrainian leaders had demanded much more ambitious military, political, and economic guarantees (even Kuchma had spoken at one point about the need for an explicit US nuclear guarantee), but the commitments they ended up accepting were surprisingly meager, as they well knew. The former president Kravchuk and many others in Ukraine complained in December 1994 that the assurances were no more than an “illusion.”[31] Even President Kuchma acknowledged that the Budapest memorandum was solely a “political document,” not a binding commitment of protection for Ukraine.[32] Although these general points had long been known among experts, Budjeryn’s book adds fascinating detail about the protracted, arduous negotiations that eventually culminated in the Budapest Memorandum. The Ukrainian government tried to extract more meaningful pledges, but a combination of political pressure and economic inducements from Western countries—at a time when no one in Ukraine could foresee the horrors that would be unleashed by the Russian government in February 2022—contributed to the final, unsatisfactory outcome.

Inheriting the Bomb will be of great interest for those who want to understand the all-too-rare process of denuclearization (South Africa in the early 1990s is the only country that has ever given up all its own nuclear weapons and its production facilities), the issues that divided Ukraine and Russia in the 1990s, the soon-to-be shattered hopes that many had for Russia’s and Ukraine’s roles in a united Europe, and the way myths about foreign affairs and national security can distort public memory and political discourse.

 

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 ushered in several major global events: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independence of former Soviet satellite states, the end to apartheid in South Africa, and an unprecedented four cases of nuclear disarmament at the southern point of Africa and in eastern Europe. While quite literally occurring on opposite sides of the globe, the four cases have a common denominator: what were the respective governments to do with their nuclear weapons arsenals following significant geopolitical changes? The apartheid regime in South Africa opted to quietly destroy its very small, indigenously developed and secret arsenal before an impending regime change and signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in mid-1991.[33] A different scenario played out in Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, four successor states (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia) inherited nearly 35,000 nuclear weapons, with 3,200 strategic nuclear warheads, most of them atop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), remaining in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. This caused quite a predicament: the terms and conditions of the NPT made it impossible for these three newly-independent states to join the treaty if they were in possession of nuclear weapons. Ultimately, Belarus and Kazakhstan renounced their claim to the inherited Soviet nuclear weapons on their territories.[34] Ukraine, however, was not so easily convinced to relinquish its inherited nuclear weapons to Russia. The country quickly became a proliferation concern, because, in addition to suddenly being in possession of a nuclear arsenal that was larger than the arsenals of the United Kingdom, China, and France combined, the “inheritance” also included enriched uranium, research reactors, missile factories, and control and guidance infrastructure.

With Inheriting the Bomb, Mariana Budjeryn makes an illuminating and important contribution to the growing field of nuclear history.[35] Based on numerous interviews and previously unavailable archival material, Budjeryn’s narrative offers a chronological discussion of the historical events following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the events leading up to Ukraine’s decision to disarm peacefully. Before delving into this history, Budjeryn offers a touching glimpse into her experiences growing up in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, leaving in 1991 for a school exchange in New York, and returning in 1992 to an independent Ukraine with a hope shared by many of her generation: “to transform it from a post-Soviet mutant into a well-governed and prosperous democracy” (2). She also relates how she, as a political science student in the 1990s, opposed nuclear weapons, but admits that she was also baffled by the heavy pressure exerted by Washington and Moscow on Kyiv to disarm, in the face of their own beliefs in nuclear weapons as an instrument of peace due to their deterrence factor. Ultimately, according to Budjeryn, nuclear disarmament was written into Ukraine’s Declaration of Sovereignty for two reasons: the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and independence, with the former illustrating “Ukraine’s lack of political agency in its own affairs” and ultimately becoming “a banner under which all Ukrainians could be rallied toward a greater independence from Moscow, on humanitarian and civic, rather than ethnonationalistic grounds” (110).

Budjeryn’s fascinating narrative is written chronologically, in two main parts. The first part looks into the Soviet nuclear collapse, while the second deals with the to-and-fro negotiations vis-à-vis Ukraine’s inherited weapons: from renunciation to ownership and deterrence, and back to renunciation.[36] Budjeryn relates how, when Ukraine became independent in August 1991, the Chernobyl disaster was one reason why Kyiv had a declared intent to become nuclear. But this intent did not last long. The quick change to the policy of “ownership and deterrence” (chapter 7, 154-186) was prompted by an awareness that Russia was disparaging Ukraine’s right to self-determination, coupled with a concern that Kyiv would not have a say in the international decisionmaking vis-à-vis the nuclear weapons that Ukrainian scientists had helped construct. Budjeryn argues, quite convincingly, that Ukraine wanted to take nuclear-related decisions as a sovereign and confident state actor. Hence, Kyiv became quite vocal in contesting Russia’s claimed monopoly on the Soviet Union’s nuclear inheritance and argued that Kyiv was now the rightful heir and legitimate owner of the nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil (8). Kyiv also insisted on equal treatment, financial compensation, and security assurances should it opt for disarmament. Its hold-out even extended to treaties such as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START), to which Kyiv conditioned its signature to the recognition of its nuclear ownership, inter alia. In short: Kyiv’s leaders believed it was their sovereign right to decide Ukraine’s nuclear future, and they were not ready to relinquish that. 

The book’s discussion of the factors that caused the Soviet Union’s collapse is illuminating. So too is the finding that the NPT terms and conditions for would-be signatories contributed to Russia being the main benefactor, and that the United States supported the weapons relinquishment to Russia in order to prevent further proliferation, but also because the NPT was created as a strategy to concentrate geopolitical power in the two superpowers. Ukraine’s opposing position overturned the proverbial apple cart, leading to careful negotiation, interspersed with some coercion and diplomatic pressure by Russia and the United States. This, combined with domestic economic woes, and considering the relationships that Ukrainian leaders had to build with other NPT signatories, ultimately led to the decision to denuclearising Ukraine, which was the last of the nuclear inheriting states to sign the NPT. 

It is important to note that Budjeryn clearly demonstrates how, in contrast to Belarus and Kazakhstan, Kyiv was able to strike a balance between showcasing its freedom of action in nuclear decisionmaking and fulfilling its commitment to nuclear disarmament. This holds an important reminder (and lesson) that disarmament does not have a one-size-fits-all pattern. Similarities between Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan included cooperation with, and between, Washington and Moscow, large sums of American dollars, and NPT-prescribed obligations. Furthermore, Budjeryn shows that the contemporary historical context of each state shaped their denuclearisation process. In Belarus, the parliament was unified and in agreement with Russia’s views on the denuclearisation process; hence, it was the first to complete the process. In contrast, Kazakhstan had a credible claim to nuclear ownership under the NPT, but opted to sign the treaty as a non-nuclear weapons state, with no opposition from parliament. In Ukraine, Kyiv’s insistence on changing geopolitical dynamics and the need for effective security guarantees prolonged the process and proved that there is no singular path towards nuclear disarmament. In contrast with the other two states, Ukraine had a strong nationalist group in parliament who lobbied for a better denuclearisation deal that included security assurances.

Budjeryn’s narrative further illuminates how the matter of the inherited nuclear weapons was quite a contentious issue between Russia and Ukraine, and how, two decades after both the United States and Russia had vaguely promised Ukraine security assurances in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, it suffered ultimate betrayal when the latter invaded the Crimea peninsula and, just a few months before Inheriting the Bomb was published in 2022, launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, the book’s release could not have been timelier: Ukraine is fighting for its existence, amidst regular ominous threats from Russia that the introduction of nuclear weapons into the conflict cannot be discarded. At the same time, other global tensions; evidence of new-generation nuclear weapons being developed and deployed; and the rise of new nuclear-armed states, place a new focus on nuclear risks and the value of nuclear weapons to deterrence.[37] It has also opened up new debates both within and beyond Ukraine, on whether it was wise to relinquish the inherited nuclear weapons. Indeed, even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lamented in 2021 that it disarming had been a big mistake, and that there would have been no Russian invasion if Ukraine had nuclear weapons. As Budjeryn notes, “my job of persuading Ukrainians, and those in a similar security predicament, that the answer is not nuclear weapons, has just gotten much, much harder” (5).

 

Response by Mariana Budjeryn, Harvard Kennedy School

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