Budjeryn Inheriting the Bomb

The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4214-4539-7
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Johns Hopkins Nuclear History and Contemporary Affairs

The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed the specter of the largest wave of nuclear proliferation in history. Why did Ukraine ultimately choose the path of nuclear disarmament?

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left its nearly 30,000 nuclear weapons spread over the territories of four newly sovereign states: Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. This collapse cast a shadow of profound ambiguity over the fate of the world's largest arsenal of the deadliest weapons ever created. In Inheriting the Bomb, Mariana Budjeryn reexamines the history of nuclear predicament caused by the Soviet collapse and the subsequent nuclear disarmament of the non-Russian Soviet successor states.

Although Belarus and Kazakhstan renounced their claim to Soviet nuclear weapons, Ukraine proved to be a difficult case: with its demand for recognition as a lawful successor state of the USSR, a nuclear superpower, the country became a major proliferation concern. And yet by 1994, Ukraine had acceded to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear-weapon state and proceeded to transfer its nuclear warheads to Russia, which emerged as the sole nuclear successor of the USSR.

How was this international proliferation crisis averted? Drawing on extensive archival research in the former Soviet Union and the United States, Budjeryn uncovers a fuller and more nuanced narrative of post-Soviet denuclearization. She reconstructs Ukraine's path to nuclear disarmament to understand how its leaders made sense of the nuclear armaments their country inherited. Among the various factors that contributed to Ukraine's nuclear renunciation, including diplomatic pressure from the United States and Russia and domestic economic woes, the NPT stands out as a salient force that provided an international framework for managing the Soviet nuclear collapse.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Budjeryn, Mariana

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Moderne Kriegsführung
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Konflikt- und Friedensforschung, Rüstungskontrolle, Abrüstung
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Militärwesen Ausrüstung & Waffen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
Part 1. Soviet Nuclear Disintegration
Chapter 1. Soviet Collapse and Nuclear Weapons
Chapter 2. Preventing Soviet Nuclear Disintegration
Chapter 3. The Road to Lisbon: Proliferation v. Succession
Chapter 4. Belarus and Kazakhstan: Paths not Taken
Part 2. Ukraine: Negotiating a Nuclear Exception
Chapter 5. The Road to Nuclear Renunciation
Chapter 6. From Renunciation to Ownership
Chapter 7. Nuclear Ownership and Deterrence
Chapter 8. From Ownership to Renunciation
In Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Budjeryn, Mariana
Mariana Budjeryn (SOUTH BERWICK, ME) is a researcher on the Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center.