Nukes Aren’t the Answer for Ukraine

Casey Michel makes the case for Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons:

But Ukraine no longer has the luxury of waiting for NATO membership. With every passing day, and especially with the reelection of Trump, the reality increasingly dawns that if we’re to guarantee Ukrainian statehood, the West must welcome Ukraine into NATO—or it must start getting ready for Ukraine to rejoin the same nuclear club it was once a part of all those years ago.

It would be an extremely bad idea for Ukraine to pursue nuclear weapons. Even assuming that they could develop and produce a small arsenal in a short period of time, it would not provide them with the security that they seek. If Moscow perceives Ukraine’s pro-Western orientation and possible NATO membership as threats, it should be obvious that it would never tolerate the creation of a Ukrainian nuclear arsenal. The Russian response to Zelensky’s trial balloon was clear that they would view any move in this direction as a provocation. Putin said, “Any step in this direction will be met with a corresponding reaction.”

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Zelensky has any intention of pursuing nuclear weapons, and that’s good. He made his remarks about nuclear weapons to emphasize how important he thinks NATO membership is, but he probably knows as well as anyone else that nuclear proliferation would be a costly distraction. In addition to feeding into Moscow’s worst fears, Ukraine’s pursuit of nuclear weapons would weaken its international support and put it at risk of becoming a pariah state instead.

It is important to remember why the U.S. insisted that the non-Russian republics give up the nuclear weapons on their territory. There was nothing “puzzling” about this effort. The U.S. position was clear: the creation of more nuclear-armed states out of the wreckage of the Soviet Union was unacceptable. That was the right answer on nonproliferation grounds, and it was also clearly the right answer as far as U.S. and allied security was concerned. Removing these weapons from the three non-Russian republics was one of the biggest successes of U.S. diplomacy in the post-Cold War era. If people like Bill Clinton now want to disparage one of the few real accomplishments they ever had on foreign policy, that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to turn off our brains and play along.

Michel’s argument relies heavily on a counterfactual that Ukraine would not have been attacked if it had somehow managed to hang on to the nuclear weapons it inherited from the USSR. Leave aside that the newly independent Ukraine didn’t want to keep these weapons, had no control over them, and couldn’t have afforded to maintain them. No Russian government would have allowed Ukraine to possess its own arsenal then or later. If Ukraine had tried to keep the nukes, there would have been a crisis and a conflict much earlier on.

Michel writes, “Decades on, America’s insistence that Ukraine divest its nuclear weapons—and give them all to Russia—is now seen as a blunder of historic proportions.” It is seen that way only by Westerners who evidently don’t understand the full history of how Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan gave up the weapons. Mariana Budjeryn dug into the history of this process in Ukraine, and she recounts it in her book Inheriting the Bomb. As I said in my review last year:

“As Budjeryn shows, there really was no serious option of keeping the inherited nuclear weapons without exposing Ukraine to international opprobrium and isolation, and the cost of building up an indigenous nuclear weapons program to maintain their own arsenal was prohibitive. She sums up the Ukrainian foreign ministry’s view at the time: “The negative repercussions of the nuclear option would far outweigh the positive.”

That was true thirty years ago, and it is still true today. The benefits would be few and short-lived, and the costs would be extremely high. Contrary to the hawkish revisionism we have been hearing in the last few years, the U.S. did Ukraine a favor by insisting that they give up those weapons.

Budjeryn also had to this to say about Ukraine and the nuclear weapons it inherited: “If Ukraine had refused to join the NPT and kept a part of its nuclear inheritance, it would not be the same country it is today but with nuclear weapons. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it would be a country at all.” Chasing after nuclear weapons isn’t going to save Ukraine, and it has the potential to lead to its complete destruction. It is grossly irresponsible to encourage Ukraine in such a disastrous course of action.