These themes are not new: indeed, Ukraine’s denuclearization had been a controversial issue even as it was negotiated, leaving bitter traces in the country’s political and public discourse.
1. Ukraine began its drive for independence with the preference to become a nonnuclear state
In its 1990 Declaration of Sovereignty, still as a Soviet republic, Ukraine declared that it wanted to become a nuclear-free and neutral state. This preference was motivated not only—not even primarily—by the general antinuclear sentiment sparked by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power station accident. The authors of the nonnuclear clause in the Declaration were the pro-independence National Democrats who judged that Ukraine could not be fully independent if Moscow continued to exercise command and control over nuclear installations on its territory. Indeed, Soviet nuclear command and control was hypercentralized and supersecretive, and for this reason very few of the republic’s leaders, even those who were part of the old Communist guard, knew about the size and scope of nuclear armaments deployed on Ukraine’s territory. To action its Declaration, Ukraine, a member of the United Nations (UN) since 1945, attempted to join the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a nonnuclear weapons state (NNWS) prior to the August 1990 NPT Review Conference. This attempt was blocked by the Soviet Politburo for a number of reasons, including the fear that membership in a prominent international treaty would bolster Ukraine’s self-proclaimed sovereignty (Potter 1995, 13). Although the nonnuclear clause was a unilateral declaration of intention, not an international legal commitment, it came to haunt Ukraine when it became less eager to disarm. Right after the unsuccessful Soviet coup d’état in August 1991, it became clear to Ukraine’s pro-independence leaders that the Soviet Union would not endure, and that severing nuclear command and control links was no longer a necessary condition for attaining full independence from Moscow. The actors who were most committed to Ukraine’s independence also viewed Russia and its latent imperialist ambitions with much suspicion. Alas, these suspicions proved all too justified: many political forces in Russia fiercely opposed the dissolution of the common military strategic space and the creation of independent armies by the former Soviet republics. They also continued to undermine the newfound fragile sovereignty of the republics by advancing territorial claims and supporting separatist movements, such as those in Moldova’s Transnistria, northern Kazakhstan, the Caucasus, and of course in Ukraine’s Crimea. Thus, the very authors of the nonnuclear clause in Ukraine’s Declaration of Sovereignty, the National Democrats, came to view Ukraine’s nuclear endowment as an insurance policy against territorial revisionism by Russia and became the most vociferous protractors of denuclearization.2. Ukraine’s situation was not unique
Belarus and Kazakhstan became the other two non-Russian Soviet republics to inherit shards of the Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal. Kazakhstan became home to the world’s fourth-largest nuclear might and Belarus possessed some of the newest missiles in the Soviet arsenal. Nor was the eventual nuclear renunciation of the former Soviet republics as unprecedented as they like to claim. In 1991, South Africa joined the NPT as an NNWS, renouncing the nuclear weapons program it had been secretly developing since the mid-1970s. Because Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan came as a “package,” all policies developed by the United States and its allies had to apply equally to all three states. That is, Ukraine could not have been “allowed” to remain nuclear without giving the other two republics a reason to claim the same for themselves. Belarus, which was also affected gravely by the Chernobyl accident, staked no claims to former Soviet nuclear armaments on its territory and generally regarded them as a burden. However, Kazakhstan, like Ukraine, became reluctant to denuclearize following the declaration of its independence in December 1991. At the same time, Kazakhstan became the focus of particular proliferation fears as a number of Middle Eastern states, including Iran, began frequenting Almaty and expressing interest in collaboration on a potential first “Muslim” bomb. This convinced the United States that withdrawing nuclear weapons from all non-Russian nuclear successors as soon as possible was imperative for preventing not only these republics from establishing independent control over their nuclear inheritances, but also the spread of sensitive nuclear technology and materials to potential proliferators elsewhere. Curbing nuclear proliferation has been one of the top priorities of US foreign policy since the late 1960s. The United States has worked to discourage nuclear acquisition not merely by the potential adversaries such as North Korea, Libya, Iraq, and Iran, but also by its own allies, such as South Korea, Italy, and West Germany. It was certainly not going to make an exception for Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.3. Ukraine’s nuclear inheritance had dubious deterrent value against Russia
Immediately after declaring its independence in August 1991, Ukraine moved to declare ownership of all assets and to subordinate all military units deployed on its territory. These included military units and assets associated with the Soviet nuclear forces: 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) armed with 1,240 nuclear warheads, 44 long-range strategic bombers armed with 588 air-launched cruise missiles (ALCM), and some 2,600 tactical nuclear weapons, including artillery shells, mines, and gravity bombs. It also inherited a vast industrial and research infrastructure that contributed to the Soviet nuclear weapons program, including the world’s largest ICBM factory— the Pivdenmash in Dnipropetrovsk—which produced 46 out of the 176 ICBMs deployed in Ukraine. From the military standpoint, tactical nuclear weapons were perhaps the most “usable” as credible deterrents for the Soviet successor states, but also the most mobile and, thus, likely to end up in the wrong hands. Probably for this reason, the Soviet military began withdrawing tactical nuclear weapons from the non-Russian republics even before the Soviet Union collapsed. By May 1992, all tactical weapons were withdrawn from Ukraine, a process over which Ukraine’s fledgling defense ministry had very little control. Operational command and control over the strategic nuclear weapons—the ICBMs and ALCMs—remained in Moscow. In April 1992, Ukraine established the so-called “administrative control” over its nuclear forces, which essentially meant that it obligated the troops associated with these units to take the Ukrainian military oath. In addition, it established some measure of negative operational control, in other words, the capacity to block a potential nuclear launch from Ukraine’s territory initiated by the Russian president and military command, who possessed the “button.” All of that, however, applied to the delivery vehicles—the missiles and the bombers. The nuclear warheads to arm these vehicles, some of them kept in separate storage facilities on the bases, were essentially in the custody of the Russian military all along. According to Western analysts, Ukraine had the technological capacity to break the Russian authorization codes and establish full operational control over its nuclear arsenal within 12 to 18 months (see DeWing 1993). Indeed, a few attempts to do so had been registered both by the Russian military and by the Western intelligence agencies in mid-1993. The question was not whether Ukraine could, but rather whether it should do so. The West made it quite clear that any attempt to establish independent operational control over Ukraine’s nuclear armaments would mean international isolation, sanctions, or even the withdrawal of diplomatic recognition extended to Ukraine by the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies on condition that Ukraine would join the NPT as an NNWS. In addition, Ukraine could certainly not count on the benevolence of the Russian political and military establishment if it moved to wrest from it the control over nuclear armaments.Had Ukraine still defied the West, outwitted Russia, and established independent control over strategic nuclear forces, it would have found them rather “unusable” as a deterrent if it was Russia that Ukraine intended to deter.
Moreover, establishing operational control over the existing missiles on Ukraine’s territory still would have left Ukraine with a problem of how to replace them once their service life expired, as Ukraine lacked some of the key elements of a nuclear weapons program.
4. Ukraine’s nuclear status was ambiguous in international legal terms
The crux of the contestation surrounding Ukraine’s disarmament was about what claims Ukraine could justifiably make about the weapons on its territory. The dissolution of a nuclear superpower was an unprecedented development and the status of the successor states in relation to its nuclear arsenal broke unchartered international legal waters. On one hand, Ukraine was indeed a successor to the Soviet Union on a par with Russia.The dissolution of a nuclear superpower was an unprecedented development and the status of the successor states in relation to its nuclear arsenal broke unchartered international legal waters.
As such, Ukraine, together with Belarus and Kazakhstan, signed the Lisbon Protocol in May 1992.
On the other hand, the West could not recognize more than one Soviet successor in respect to the UN Security Council seat, and the status of a nuclear weapons state (NWS) under the NPT. Russia alone was recognized as succeeding the Soviet Union in those two respects. This decision was mostly political, for to do otherwise would spell cardinal changes to the entire international order. International law, however, provided support for this decision as well. The 1978 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of Treaties (United Nations 1978) stipulates that when a single state breaks apart, its successors shall continue their obligations with respect to those treaties in force for their predecessor, unless undertaking such obligations would defy the very objectives and purposes of the treaty. When the NPT was signed in 1968, its very purpose was to limit the number of states possessing nuclear weapons to those that had already manufactured and exploded a nuclear device by that time. In 1968, only five states met the criteria: the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, and China. The first three became the depositaries of the NPT, and France and China would eventually join the treaty in 1992, thus, perfectly aligning the NPT’s NWSs with the permanent members of the UN Security Council. To admit Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan as NWSs into the NPT would be to defy the core purpose of the treaty. Therefore, Ukraine could choose to remain nuclear only outside of the NPT, like North Korea (which withdrew from the treaty in 2003), Israel, Pakistan, and India do today. At the time, it was made clear to Ukraine in no uncertain terms that such a path would spell international isolation and sanctions. In the end, this was not the route Ukraine, a new democracy eager to join the international community on good terms after decades of entrapment in a totalitarian state, opted to pursue. Thus, the Lisbon Protocol committed Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to joining the NPT as NNWSs. In addition, the leaders of the three states wrote letters—attached to the Protocol—committing to eliminate all nuclear weapons on their territory in the seven-year period provided for the implementation of START. The Ukrainian parliament repeatedly delayed the ratification of the START/Lisbon package, and in November 1993 passed it with the exclusion of the article committing Ukraine to join the NPT as an NNWS. While the conditional ratification of START/Lisbon encountered a severe international backlash, it helped Ukraine negotiate further concessions from the West and Russia, including increased US aid and the compensation for the tactical nuclear weapons withdrawn from Ukraine in early 1992, a question Russia refused to even entertain previously.Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons not because of Western pressure or of the things it thought it got in exchange, but because of the country it wanted to be.
5. Ukraine was compensated for the value of its nuclear weapons
Despite the ambiguities in its nuclear status, Ukraine obtained compensation for the value of the highly enriched uranium (HEU) contained in all nuclear warheads removed from its territory, in addition to receiving US technical assistance funds to dismantle and transfer nuclear weapons to Russia. In 1993, the United States and Russia concluded a deal whereby the United States would purchase the HEU released from dismantled Soviet warheads to be blended down and used as fuel for its nuclear power stations. Under this program, which became known as Megatons to Megawatts and ran until 2013, the United States purchased 500 metric tons of HEU for about $17 billion. Although the deal was negotiated bilaterally, the United States accepted that the proceeds from the sale should also go to Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan equal to the amount of HEU extracted from the warheads situated on their territory. Russia, of course, was opposed to that as it considered the warheads to be the property of Russia alone. Yet, due to Ukraine’s tough negotiating stance and the support of the United States, all non-Russian nuclear heirs managed to obtain compensation for their HEU. For Ukraine, this came in the form of Russian nuclear fuel assemblies for its nuclear power stations and the forgiveness of a portion of Ukraine’s energy debt to Russia. (How this debt was accrued, who ultimately benefited from its forgiveness, and thus from the sale of Ukraine’s HEU, is the subject of a separate discussion.) This compensation was important not only in pecuniary terms, although Ukraine received upward of $1 billion in compensation, but also in principle: effectively, it meant the acceptance of Ukraine’s claim that it was the rightful owner of the nuclear weapons on its territory.Finally, Ukraine, as well as Belarus and Kazakhstan, obtained security assurances from the NPT depositary states in the now-infamous Budapest Memorandum signed on December 5, 1994 (see Budjeryn 2014). France and China extended similar assurances in separate statements. At the time, Ukrainian leaders knew full well that these assurances were not the legally binding guarantees they sought. This was not for the lack of trying on Ukraine’s part: negotiations on security guarantees had proceeded since mid-1992, but Ukrainians found it virtually impossible to exert from the United States the kind of security commitments it pledged to its NATO allies and strategic partners. Russia would agree to recognize Ukraine’s borders only within the borders of the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a condition Ukraine refused to accept and which was eventually lifted in the Budapest Memorandum. After the signature of the Memorandum, Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk stated: “If tomorrow Russia goes into Crimea, no one will even raise an eyebrow” (The Moscow Times 1994).The West bears a far greater obligation with respect to Ukraine than it has demonstrated thus far.

Implying that Ukraine’s disarmament was naïve or ill-considered deprives Ukraine of the credit it deserves and robs its nuclear predicament of the complexities that its leaders had to navigate.
Ukraine should own its nuclear disarmament decision—and own it with pride.
Budjeryn, M. 2014. “The Breach: Ukraine’s Territorial Integrity and the Budapest Mem-orandum.” Woodrow Wilson Center NPIHP, September. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/issue-brief-3-the-breach-ukraines-territorial-integrity-and-the-buda- pest-memorandum
DeWing, M. J. 1993. “The Ukrainian Nuclear Arsenal: Problems of Command, Control and Maintenance.” Master’s Thesis. Naval Postgraduate College, Monterey, CA.
Kataev, V. 1994. “Report ‘About Strategic Nuclear Missiles and Other Weapons in Ukraine.’” Box 13, Folder 26. Vitaly Kataev Collection, Hoover Institution Archive.
Khan, F. H. 2012. Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kincade, W. H. 1993. “Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine: Hollow Threat, Wasting Asset.” Arms Control Today 23(6): 13-18.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. 1992. “Memorandum Ministerstva Zakordonnykh Sprav Ukraiiny [Memorandum of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine].” Fond 1, Delo 6857, List 241–246. Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.
The Moscow Times. 1994. “Kiev Scorns NPT Exchange Deal.” December 8. http://old. themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/1994/12/article/kiev-scorns-npt-exchange- deal/345274.html
Potter, W. 1995. “The Politics of Nuclear Renunciation: The Cases of Belarus, Kazakh-stan, and Ukraine.” Occasional Paper No. 22. Washington, D.C: Henry L. Stimson Center.
Umland, A. 2016. “The Ukraine Example: Nuclear Disarmament Doesn’t Pay.” World Affairs. http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/ukraine-example-nuclear-disarmament-doesn%E2%80%99t-pay
United Nations. 1978. “Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of Treaties.” http://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/3_2_1978.pdf

Mariana Budjeryn is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Her research investigates the role of the international nonproliferation regime in the politics of nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her publications on the topic and commentaries on current events in Ukraine and Russia appeared, in addition to World Affairs, in Wilson Center publications, The Nonproliferation Review, and Arms Control Today.