Welcome to The Backstory. Every Sunday, we’ll guide you through the debates driving U.S. foreign policy and international affairs using pieces from the Foreign Affairs archives—some recent, some decades old. |
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In 1994, the newly independent state of Ukraine made a fateful decision. It gave up the vast arsenal of nuclear weapons that had come into its possession after the collapse of the Soviet Union in exchange for assurances from Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States that its sovereignty and territorial integrity would be respected.
It was a decision many in Ukraine have second-guessed in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of the country this year. “But Ukraine’s regrets about nuclear disarmament are misplaced,” Mariana Budjeryn writes in Foreign Affairs this week. “What Ukraine inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union was less of a usable nuclear deterrent than a proliferation starter kit that could have set the country on a path to becoming a nuclear pariah. The real mistake was not Ukraine’s decision to disarm but the West’s failure to hold up its end of the bargain.”
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Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was working to ensure that only Russia would emerge from the post-Soviet rubble as a nuclear armed state. The fear, as Steven Miller argued in 1993, was that a nuclear deterrent would not help Ukraine keep the peace with Russia but rather cause endemic instability. “Ukrainian leaders will, for good reason, be considerably less confident in the survivability of their nuclear deterrent forces—a situation that would probably lead to first-use doctrines and hair-trigger postures,” Miller wrote. “The potential for trouble is obvious.”
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Still, it was not inevitable that Ukraine would voluntarily denuclearize. The country initially claimed to be a rightful inheritor of the Soviet nuclear legacy housed on its territory. And although Ukraine did not possess the launch authority for the more than 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons it possessed—that authority remained with the so-called nuclear briefcase in Moscow—it could have developed its own command-and-control system to wrest authority over the nukes. That is what John Mearsheimer, writing in 1993, urged Ukraine to do. A nuclear deterrent “is imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine,” he argued. “Ukraine cannot defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia with conventional weapons, and no state, including the United States, is going to extend to it a meaningful security guarantee. Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression.”
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That warning has proved painfully prescient. Not only did U.S. and British assurances fail to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin; now he is “likely using the specter of nuclear escalation as cover for increasingly brutal tactics on the ground and to pressure Kyiv into surrendering,” as Olga Oliker wrote last month.
Still, it is not too late for the West to help Ukraine defend itself and, in so doing, vindicate Ukraine’s decision to disarm. “If Ukraine beats back the Russian invasion, then countries may come to place less stock in nuclear weapons, potentially paving the way for a world in which no one has the power to unleash nuclear Armageddon,” Budjeryn writes. But if Ukraine loses the war “while the United States and its allies stand by, deterred by the specter of nuclear escalation, nuclear renunciation will come to be seen as folly—even if, in Ukraine’s case, it was the only sensible choice.”
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