The Story of How Ukraine Lost Its Nuclear Arsenal
Never-before-released archival files reveal Washington’s error in cudgeling Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons despite the risk of a Russian invasion.
 From previous issue
by George E. Bogden
The National Interest
October 27, 2023
This baffling explanation likely sounded presumptuous to an exclusively European institution.
Yet, as Talbott asserted, “the U.S. has sought to avoid an abstract, theological debate on the extent to which Russia and Ukraine were part of Europe.” As a result, Ukraine’s attempt at a concrete security guarantee—even a much less potent one—remained out of the question.
Rather, Ukraine would instead have to settle for the high-level public restatements of the assurances it received in the Trilateral Agreement and, later, via the Budapest Memorandum.
A month later, Talbott addressed the North Atlantic Council regarding his efforts on India and Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, which he analogized to the “Moscow-Kiev shuttle.” Ambassador Leif Mevik of Norway asked if Talbott had read Charles Krauthammer’s op-ed published two weeks before, in which the author “posited two categories of new nuclear states.”
“First,” the Ambassador explained, “there were the ‘good guys,’ which are not outlaws”; second, “there were the outlaws, North Korea, Iraq, and Libya, which should be kept at bay as long as possible.” Mevik asked whether Talbott made “the same distinction between non-threatening and outlaw-nuclear-weapon states.” He responded, “The U.S. opposes proliferation in general.”
Perhaps the American stance towards Ukraine’s security concerns is best summarized by Rose Gottemoeller, who would serve on the White House National Security Council as Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. She recently attributed the following joke to one of the American negotiators on the nuclear question:
Kyiv’s airport has long runways made for bombers, and the wheels whined upon our long landings for what seemed like ten minutes. When we were arriving at the airport, John Gordon, then Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, said[,] ‘Ukraine is the only country where the whining never ends.’
“Though we accorded them respect and they played their difficult hand well,” Gottemoeller recalled in an interview, “they were seen as whiners.”
The Club of Civilization
A month before the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the final step in its legal commitment to disarm, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin met. The question of nuclear parity once again entered the picture.
Russia’s Defense Minister, Pavel Grachev, who was present, stated: “We are cutting back strategic nuclear weapons in accordance with START I, but the Treaty is not ratified. Now START II is pressing us, with a date of 2003 to complete reductions.” The sequel to START would extend its cuts. He added, “If you do not press Ukraine, then we will not be able to proceed with START II.”
Yeltsin chimed in, “So we have to press Ukraine with all our might.” President Clinton added, “So we need to press them to accede to the Non-Proliferation Treaty by the time of the [upcoming] Summit in Budapest.” Yeltsin thundered, “we should bring all the pressure we have to bear. We signed the Trilateral accord, we three, so then what?” Though Russia would postpone ratifying START II until it became obsolete, Yeltsin assured Clinton at the time, “I’m going to press [Ukraine’s newly-elected President Leonid] Kuchma to the wall. NPT or they get no gas or oil!”
Other concerns plagued the Clinton team. The NPT, which came into effect in 1970, approached a precipice. It initially had a twenty-five-year lifespan. In 1995, a conference would decide its fate. Thomas Graham, Jr., Clinton’s diplomat in charge of ensuring the document survived, attested that “delegates had the power on a one-time basis to bind their governments to an extension.” He added, “any further extension could only be by treaty amendment, a practical impossibility.”
In short, the NPT had aged into a legal Humpty Dumpty. A failure in 1995—even in the form of a fixed extension—would have been a great fall. Putting the NPT back together again would have entailed lengthy negotiations and re-ratification, presuming a quorum existed to reconstitute it.
Graham observed that “indefinite extension appeared in 1992 and 1993 to be a long shot.” Although France and China had joined in 1992, when Ambassador Errera asked his counterpart, Ambassador Ho, about Beijing’s intentions, he said, “Indefinite? That is a good word but we do not have that word in the Chinese language.” Amid this dissent, Graham memorialized that the “majority remained uncertain” to favor making the NPT permanent.
Many of the treaty’s signatories remained on the fence. Some—like Indonesia, Egypt, Mexico, and Malaysia—looked forward to lucrative political wrangling. Ukraine’s status outside the NPT would have been their most valuable bargaining chip. Skeptical governments could point both to Kyiv’s nonadherence and its grievances about adequate guaranties to justify holding out for concessions.
According to Graham, Belarus and Kazakhstan’s earlier NPT accessions “focused all attention on Ukraine.” When discussing the NPT’s fate with NATO allies in the summer of 1994, Talbott stressed “acute worry about Ukraine.”
Graham’s address to the Rada in 1994 called the treaty a “Club of Civilization,” which he implored the deputies to join. Had the body’s vote reflected the will of the people, his appeal would likely have failed. Just over a year before, a poll by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences found that under 50 percent of the population favored becoming “non-nuclear.” Another independent research center, “Democratic Initiatives,” found three months later that 45.3 percent preferred “nuclear-weapon status” for Ukraine, whereas 35 percent preferred disarmament.
Ukraine’s farmers, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and laborers likely saw the club they were asked to join as premised on the exclusive position of five great powers, who jealously guarded their station. When citizens were consulted on the issue in 1994 by the Advisory Council to the Ukrainian Parliament, Ian Brzezinski summarized input from Bohdan Horyn, a human rights activist and dissident: “The West has failed to adequately respond to the resurgence of Russian hegemony.” Struggling to speak in English, one participant asked, “why did not America help us in 1933?” The unnamed citizen stated, “Ukraine must rely only on its own forces for its defenses.”
As Kuchma deposited the treaty in Budapest weeks later, as the memorandum required, French President Francois Mitterrand remarked to him, “young man, you will be tricked, one way or the other.” “Don’t believe them,” he admonished, “they will cheat you.”
Two weeks after Yeltsin left the stage in Budapest, where he declared a “cold peace,” the celebrated reformer tested the Topol-M, a missile lavishly redesigned in 1992, capable of striking American soil—later wielded as evidence Russia could overcome Western defenses. On New Year’s Eve, he launched an invasion in Chechnya that killed tens of thousands, justifying delays in Russia’s domestic elections.
Rarely does a commander-in-chief openly disavow a prior foreign policy decision. But Bill Clinton repeatedly did so last spring. Referring to the Budapest Memorandum, Clinton stated his regret for insisting Ukraine “agree to give up [its] nuclear weapons.” He also admitted that the story of the agreement was hardly the open-and-shut case of win-win nonproliferation that advocates have presented. “None of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons,” Clinton said, referring to the ongoing full-scale invasion.
Shell Games and Security Guarantees
The satellite images are eerie and unequivocal: President Putin has delivered on his threat to install weapons of mass destruction in Belarus, his ally adjacent to Ukraine.
No one should be surprised. Since launching his invasion, Mr. Putin and his acolytes have often touted their willingness to use nuclear arms. Earlier this month, Moscow orchestrated national drills to prepare for nuclear retaliation.
A few days later, Belarusian president Aleksander Lukashenko opined, “[The] Americans are pushing Russians toward using the most terrifying weapon,” referencing Washington’s sending long-range missiles to Ukraine. Russia, Lukashenko insisted, “will take out the red button and put it on the table.”
The same Western commentators who argue these provocations amount to mere bluffing tend to defend the removal of Kyiv’s nuclear arsenal thirty years ago. Their camp reflexively rejects claims that history could have taken a different course. As Clinton’s comments make clear, however, the story of the Budapest Memorandum is anything but settled history. And, as a new wave of historical revelations shows, the time has come to overturn such simplifications.
Ukraine may very well have had the means to operate a nuclear arsenal.
Maintaining those weapons would have potentially deterred Russia, and there are now very few reasons to doubt the Kremlin’s long-term plans to invade its neighbor date back to the 1990s. This outcome was also something top American officials worried about at the time themselves.
Documents unearthed in the last two years similarly undermine the presumption that moral arguments about global nonproliferation played a predominant role in Ukraine’s renunciation of nuclear arms. Rather than embarking on an idealistic crusade to reduce the number of nuclear weapons worldwide, it was more of a shell game carried out with the grittiest and most realpolitik of aims: calming Russian insecurities about the size of its nuclear stockpile compared to the United States and shoring up a legal regime that would soon become a dead letter.
And while the archival record also reveals key moments of self-awareness about the threat Russia posed, American officials pushed ahead regardless—seemingly reassured in the misapprehension that Russian aggression could be negotiated or theorized away in the future.
These officials wanted to bring Yeltsin and company into the democratic fold and were willing to pay almost any price to see that happen. It was a gamble—a well-meaning and perhaps even worthwhile one—but the chips they were gambling belonged to someone else.
And what did Ukraine get? With over 100,000 Ukrainian souls lost since 2014 and a trillion dollars of wreckage piled high by Mr. Putin’s war, the country’s brief interregnum of peaceful independence offers little solace.
The only thing Ukraine didn’t get was what it wanted all along: Not nuclear weapons, but the security those weapons provide. Ukrainians would have gladly traded every warhead for serious means by which they could have quashed its neighbor’s imperial impulses. But that was denied to Kyiv as well.
The tale of Ukraine’s disarmament is really one of great powers haggling over a vulnerable nation’s fate despite its protests and legitimate concerns about regional security. That is the true story of the Budapest Memorandum. Then, as now, close-minded determinism bears grave dangers. It’s time policymakers came to full grips with that reality.
George E. Bogden is a Krauthammer Fellow and an Olin Fellow at Columbia Law School. The Smith Richardson Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the British Library, and the Kennan Institute funded his research for this article.
