‘Giving up nukes has left us weak’
The general still mourns his long-lost nukes. Leaking pipes have dampened the office walls and ceilings in the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces Veterans’ Office in Kyiv, causing pictures of his missile arsenal to bubble and bend.
He walks through rooms of faded nuclear glory, touching pieces of ‘‘Satan’’ intercontinental ballistic missile engines, tritium boosters, and fragments of SS-24 ‘‘Scalpel’’ rocket launch systems – all that is left of Ukraine’s nuclear missile stockpile, once the thirdlargest in the world.
‘‘I knew deep in my soul that we should never have given them away,’’ he says, caressing vestiges of machinery that could have destroyed America many times over, then turning to point at obsolete maps of Ukraine scattered with red flags marking missile silos.
‘‘If we still had our nuclear weapons now, we would have our respect and security, and be free of Russian aggression.’’
Major General Mykola Filatov, formerly commander of the 46th Missile Division, is not alone in his sorrow. As Ukraine braces itself against Russian military pressure, the loss of its arsenal is rued across the nation and abroad.
The country handed over or destroyed its missiles as part of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, in a deal supposed to guarantee its safety from attack. Its disarmament was heralded as a beacon of hope for reductions of stockpiles across the world.
Today, with more than 100,000
Russian troops gathered near Ukraine’s borders, bereft of deterrent and facing invasion by a nuclear power, that hope is dead.
‘‘The lesson of Budapest is clear,’’ said Filatov, 72, who until the deal was signed controlled 86 missile silos and more than 700 of the 1700 nuclear warheads that remained in Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union. ‘‘Don’t disarm!’’
The Budapest Memorandum is now referenced by all sides in the gathering conflict. Signed in Hungary on December 5, 1994, it guaranteed that Ukraine would
be safeguarded from nuclear attack or territorial violation in return for getting rid of its nuclear weapons. Yet the deal contained no enforcement measures, and never became a recognised international treaty backed by Western military commitment.
At Filatov’s former headquarters in the underground nuclear command silo at Pobuzke in central Ukraine, the last such facility in the country, his veterans reflected on their nuclear heyday.
‘‘Ukraine would still have
Crimea and the Donbas if we had held on to our rockets,’’ said a former colonel and launch operator of the 46th Missile Division, known only by his first name Gennady, who spent six years underground in missile silos.
‘‘Our rockets were our power. Budapest has left us weak.’’
The Budapest Memorandum was applauded in its time as a check against visions of armageddon. Its violation has caused alarm among nuclear experts across the world, who fear that the Ukraine crisis may now destabilise nonproliferation
efforts elsewhere.
‘‘Iran and North Korea will look at Ukraine and see another example in which commitments attached to giving up nuclear weapons were not fulfilled,’’ said David Albright, a physicist and nuclear proliferation expert who founded the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, DC.
‘‘Those thinking of acquiring nuclear weapons will be even keener to have them if their neighbours already do so. The Ukraine crisis makes it unclear if giving up nuclear weapons is in your country’s interests, and it increases the motivation of other countries to get hold of nuclear weapons.’’