FLASH
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In a "secret room" in Kiev, on April 13, 1993, the first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, sat down to lunch with his Georgian counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze.
As they drank "borscht" soup and ate "pampushka" cake, the Ukrainian is reported to have confessed that, even in the midst of the great corruption and the economic crisis, the "biggest headache" for him was the pressure from Washington to hand over to Russia hundreds of Soviet-made nuclear weapons.
The Georgian president lowered his voice, agreeing with the host. Americans, he said, "do not understand the complicated, very difficult and brutal history of our relations with Russia and with the Soviet Union, or with other empires."
Then Shevardnadze offered an idea: Instead of disarming completely, Ukraine should only keep one functional nuclear missile on its territory, "to deter some crazy person." After all, added the Georgian president, "today we have the 'democrat' [Boris] Yeltsin in the Kremlin", but "who knows who may come after him".
That plan, which the former foreign minister of Georgia, Tedo Japaridze, claims in his memoirs that he heard, would not be realized. In June 1996, Kiev announced that the last of Ukraine's approximately 2,000 nuclear weapons had been shipped to Russia.
In exchange for the destruction or surrender of nuclear weapons and their stockpiles, Kiev received $1 billion in compensation and other aid from Washington and Moscow. Ukraine also received a pledge signed by the United States, Britain and Russia – known as the Budapest Memorandum – that it would never be attacked by any of these major nuclear powers.
After the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Washington was concerned about the "uncontrolled nuclear weapons" that were now in the hands of some of the new governments of the post-Soviet states. Many feared that these weapons of mass destruction were vulnerable to accidents, terrorism or even the whims of corrupt guardians. In 1991, the US created a program tasked with "securing and dismantling weapons of mass destruction and their infrastructure in the former Soviet Union."
The liquidation of Soviet nuclear weapons by the US-funded program was a several-year process that took place largely out of the public eye, except for occasional press conferences in which the destruction of the missiles was shown. But a series of remarkable photographs in the US National Archives shed light on the work that was done.
The photos were taken "to provide the Department of Defense, as well as the public, with visual evidence of progress" in dismantling Soviet weapons, according to the archives.
The images published here are some of the thousands of photographs stored in the archives, which show the work of the project in Ukraine. Most of them are of low quality and are not accompanied by detailed descriptions. In many cases, the dates accompanying the photographs differ markedly from those that appear printed on them. Still, the photographs remain interesting traces of a process that, for better or worse, almost certainly changed the course of the 21st century.
Mariana Budjeryn, an expert at Harvard University who has written a book on the nuclear disarmament of her homeland, Ukraine, told RFE/RL that photos like the one above of a Tu-95 highlight a key aspect of process, which is often overlooked. "What is forgotten in discussions about the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine is that it was not only nuclear," she says.
Twenty-seven Tu-95 bombers (above) have been destroyed under the program, along with 11 Tu-160 supersonic bombers. Eleven more strategic bombers and more than 500 cruise missiles have been transferred to Russia. Some of these missiles were then used to attack Ukraine. Budjeryn says that a US official who witnessed the destruction of Ukraine's strategic fighter jets described seeing "grown men, military pilots, crying on the runway as they watched Tu-160 bombers, Fringos, unused for missions or for training, being torn apart".
US Senator Richard Lugar, who was one of the key drivers of the project to remove nuclear weapons from the former Soviet states, later recalled that, in some cases, providing housing was part of an offer to relocate the missiles. Lugar told a journalist about a base in Belarus, where "the people who lived near these missiles had very good living conditions. And, to maintain those conditions, they were willing to keep the missiles." The senator described it as "a strange kind of fairy tale, but, nevertheless, it was very serious". As part of the negotiations, he said, "in order to move the missiles, the families had to be moved as well, houses were to be built for them, in a place outside this base, which we wanted them to see closed, for our safety".
The US-led effort to destroy nuclear weapons in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine was widely seen as a step towards a safer world. In 1996, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma called on other countries to "follow our lead and do everything to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth as soon as possible."
However, in the case of Ukraine, Maria Budjeryn says that today, for many, looking back, especially the loss of Ukraine's strategic bombers and cruise missiles, "seems more a triumph of hope over prudence"./REL
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