Ukraine, pummeled by Russia now, had world’s third-biggest nuclear stockpile

It wasn’t the UK, France or China, but Ukraine that had the world’s third-biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons. Now a non-nuclear nation, Ukraine also had over 170 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and thermonuclear warheads but traded-off the entire arsenal for independence. That history might be causing some heartache among Ukrainians as Ukraine claims to have been hit by Russia with an ICBM, the first-known case of its use.
In a dangerous escalation to the Ukraine-Russia war, which has been going for over 1,000 days now, Ukraine claimed that Russian forces hit the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with an ICBM, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Moscow denied the allegations.
This comes after Ukraine fired six US-made long-range missiles into Russia after approval of their use from the Biden administration. This was believed by Russia to be the crossing of a red line drawn by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The world has seldom been so close to the outbreak of a nuclear conflict as it does today.
But come to think of it, in a world where several countries have tried to get their hands on nuclear weapons and some are covertly trying to do so, Ukraine stands out as an exception.
As an inheritance from the Soviet Union, Ukraine possessed the third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons after Russia and the US.
“Ukraine had 1,900 Soviet strategic nuclear warheads and between 2,650 and 4,200 Soviet tactical nuclear weapons deployed on its territory at the time of independence in 1991,” according to the Nuclear Threat Institute (NTI), a Washington DC-based global security organisation.
Ukraine was one of four republics where the Soviet Union had expanded its nuclear programme to, other than Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Not just nuclear weapons, it even had 176 ICBMs, missiles with a minimum range of 5,500km, according to NTI.
It also had 10 thermonuclear bombs, many times more powerful than the atomic bombs than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today, Ukraine doesn’t have any nuclear weapons, and a section of Ukrainians are ruing the decision as it faces invasion from Russia. Ukraine is in fact heavily dependent on the US for its military needs to fight Russia off.
“The gist is, ‘We had the weapons, gave them up and now look what’s happening,’” Mariana Budjeryn, an Ukraine specialist at Harvard University, told The New York Times.
So, what was it that compelled Ukraine to hand over all its Soviet nuclear stockpile to Russia?
One fact that needs to be understood is that the operational control of the Soviet stockpile was always with Russia. It was Moscow that had the ‘nuclear briefcase’, meaning the device for authorisation, transmission and codes to launch attacks.
However, Ukrainian scientists worked on the Soviet nuclear programme and Ukraine possessed scientific knowledge for operation and maintenance of the stockpile.
In the early 1990s, Ukraine wasn’t known in the international community and needed to build a reputation and identity as it sought recognition to become an independent nation.
It used the nuclear stockpile of over 5,000 weapons as a bargaining chip.
“It would have cost Ukraine quite a bit, both economically and in terms of international political repercussions, to hold on to these arms. So it would not have been an easy decision,” Harvard’s Mariana Budjeryn told NPR in a separate interview.
The 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, a Ukrainian city, also made the word nuclear an anathema to the people.
It was because of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in northern Ukraine that the nation “felt the need to eliminate nuclear weapons”, according to William Miller, the US ambassador to Ukraine from 1993 to 1998.
More than anything else, it was for independence that Ukraine gave up its nuclear deterrence.
Nuclear disarmament became a cornerstone of Ukraine’s bid for independence in 1991, according to Volodymyr Vasylenko, who was one of the authors of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine.
“By being a nuclear power, [Ukraine] could not attain full independence,” Vasylenko said, according to the Kyiv Independent.
Several top officials, including Volodymyr Tolubko, a former nuclear-base commander and Ukrainian member of Parliament, insisted Ukraine should never give up the nuclear edge.
In 1992, he called Ukraine’s rush to declare itself a non-nuclear state “romantic and premature”, according to The New York Times. He argued for a residual missile force to “deter any aggressor”, according to the report.
But the majority view was otherwise.
Ukraine declared independence in 1991 and became a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the 1968 flagship agreement against nuclear weapons, in 1994. That agreement guaranteed the protection of Ukraine’s sovereignty, and is better known as the Budapest Memorandum. It is being hotly debated amid the Russian invasion.
Russia, which inherited the Soviet Union’s debt, also inherited the arsenal. Ukraine started transferring missiles and nuclear warheads to Russia in 1994 after the Budapest Memorandum.
As the last nuclear warhead crossed into Russia on June 2, 1996, Ukraine lost its nuclear tag.
So, Ukraine, which possessed the third-largest nuclear stockpile, became the non-nuclear poster boy in exchange for assurances from western powers, mainly the US, and Russia. But there is an overwhelming agreement that by giving away the Soviet weapons to Russia, Ukraine did the right thing at the right time.