Deterrence in Ukraine

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

Ukraine did not possess nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:26

And I am Dr. Aaron Stein, a director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. How you doing, Aaron? Good.

Jeffrey 0:34

Long time no talk. It's good to see you. It is good to see you. We get to see each other because we're on Zoom. Other people are lucky they don't have to stare at our ugly mugs.

Aaron 0:44

Yeah, in my son's bedroom, you can see a sort of like pop art picture over my shoulder there, a little Ikea action over there. You get a little glimpse into my life.

Jeffrey 0:53

I'm back in my office, which is actually in the middle of getting a big clean out.

Aaron 0:59

Oh, oh, that's nice. You know, I know the, I don't know if I can say on the pod, but Bill's office, who's the big boss, I remember his office was so full of papers when we were there. I think the fire department declared it a structural hazard. I'm not even making that up.

Jeffrey 1:13

It was something. The new office is, well, let's just say I am pleased to not have the messiest office in a workplace because with no other institution where I have ever worked, has that ever been the case?

Aaron 1:31

Let's call them studious. There were a lot of papers there, a lot of which were about the era that we're going to talk about today. Oh, the 1990s. Oh, yeah. This is the Pearl Jam era.

Jeffrey 1:42

Torn jeans, flannel shirts. People get real nostalgic for the 1990s because they think the music is so good, which it was. But what people forget is all that great music involved people singing about how badly things sucked.

Aaron 2:02

And you know where things really sucked? The former Soviet Union. I think the listeners are tortured attempts at transition. We are talking about Ukraine today because it's in the news. And I think we're on the precipice of an invasion. We're recording this. I'm just going to say the time so people know. It's February 23rd at 5.04 p.m. East Coast time.

The Russians have not yet fully invaded, but I think we all expect them to do so. And nuclear weapons have been the talk of the town, at least in certain niche podcasting circles.

Jeffrey 2:34

Yes, there are so many different angles we could have taken on this. We could have taken on the OSINT new space angle. But I think in true arms control wonk podcast fashion, we're just going to carp and complain and whine and moan about our least favorite statement that is the go-to argument of all the beard stroking. Hair flipping fake experts out there.

No, Ukraine did not possess nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were not the third largest or whatever you want to say nuclear power. They did not give up. Well, I think one of the – we'll talk about this, you know, and we'll talk about the history and why you make that statement.

Aaron 3:46

But I also think it matters because one of the many or myriad of justifications that the Putin that we have come to loathe on this podcast is making to invade Ukraine is in some ways linked to this argument that they could revive a nuclear weapons program that they inherited from the Soviet Union. So I think we have to take on both of those tasks because neither of which are really grounded in reality.

Jeffrey 4:12

Yeah, in a really bizarre way, this argument has come full circle. And we're now listening to Vladimir Putin talking about how Ukraine could build nuclear weapons and that's a reason to invade. And I think it in large part drafts on this false public perception that they both possessed Soviet weapons at the end of the Soviet Union and that they had a viable path toward a nuclear option.

And it makes me crazy, Aaron.

Aaron 4:45

Well, let's, okay, so let's start at the beginning. It's undeniable that at the collapse of the Soviet Union, you know, when at the breakaway of the once, you know, part of the socialist republics, there were nuclear weapons in modern day Ukraine, but they were Soviet weapons. Maybe you take it up from there.

Jeffrey 5:03

Yes, because it is also undeniable that at the moment, there are nuclear weapons in Turkey. There are nuclear weapons in Belgium and Netherlands and Germany and Italy and... I'm probably forgetting one because I'm so seething with anger. But we don't refer to those countries as nuclear powers because they did not possess operational control of those weapons. And that's not a technicality.

Right. I mean, the Turkish... Is he a president now? He's a president, yeah. He's president, right. He's president for life, right? Erdogan cannot order the use of those weapons.

Aaron 5:52

No.

Jeffrey 5:53

And Leonid Kravchuk could not order the use of those weapons either. And so, you know, it is undeniable that Ukraine found itself with former Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its territory. And perhaps there was a legal argument it might have made to assert legal sovereignty over those weapons. But that's a purely academic exercise. Those weapons were controlled from Moscow.

Aaron 6:30

With forces that reported to Moscow.

Jeffrey 6:33

Yes, there's actually a really wonderful historical article or monograph. That the Defense Threat Reduction Agency created by Joseph Hanoran. And it's one of... You know, he's written a number of these. And they're all extremely good. And I think he says it in the best possible way. Because he actually... Hanoran actually goes through a case study involving a particular strategic rocket forces unit in Ukraine.

So it's not hypothetical. It's not abstract. I mean, he really digs down. And what he says about Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, and I think it is worth repeating is this, and this is a quote. The rocket armies, missile divisions, and bomber commands were led by Russian generals, operated and maintained by Russian officers and men. They were controlled from higher headquarters in the Russian capital for their personnel, funding, communications, nuclear safety standards, security systems, even their operational targets.

Their professional loyalty was to Russia, but their armies and commands were located in another nation's territories. To me, that is the perfect encapsulation of the situation. And any effort to sort of confuse that or complicate that is, I think, deeply misleading about what the actual policy choices were that were available to the Ukrainian government.

Aaron 8:14

I do think it's undeniable, and perhaps this is where some people muddy it, who haven't read the DITRA history or other sort of similar histories that are out there, is that the Ukrainians were the most, let's say, capitalistic in terms of getting extractions from the Russians, the follow-ons, in terms of how to take them back, right?

Jeffrey 8:36

Right. And I think that The reason that the claims that they possess the weapons muddy the waters is because what really was happening is that Ukraine had these options. They could assert legal authority over these weapons, which as a practical matter wouldn't have made a difference, but would have been a crisis of sorts. Yeah, definitely. And they could have attempted to seize the weapons, which I think is now we're in the land of fantasy, and maybe a few extremist figures might suggest that.

I don't think that would have been successful, but that also would have been a crisis of sorts. And so I think what the Ukrainian government did at that moment, which was wise... Was see that they had this opportunity to trade away something that they didn't really possess and would never come to possess, but they could at least renounce their legal rights and offer the avoidance of a crisis.

They could offer the avoidance of a crisis in exchange for the recognition and assistance that they wanted. And so I think when people say that they had them and they gave them up, it creates this false choice where it's like, oh, are we going to count on our nuclear deterrent or the goodwill of the world? And it's, you know, it's scummier than that.

You know, they know that they have to give this stuff up. But they agreed to not make a big fuss out of it in exchange for that assistance. So it's the right decision they made. But it's fundamentally different than the way it's being presented now.

Aaron 10:21

I mean, maybe we should talk a little bit about the dudes who were actually stationed at the places where these weapons were stored. They reported to, I mean, there were Russian generals in charge who directly reported to Moscow. So operational control was in Russia. But obviously, Ukraine was a newly independent state. And so there were some dynamics there that I think that is worth explaining a little bit to tease out, because this is also something that has come up.

Jeffrey 10:53

Yeah, I mean, the Ukrainian government made an effort to try to get former Soviet troops in Ukraine to pledge their loyalty to the new Ukrainian government. And, you know, I'm sure there were some Ukrainians or nationalist-minded Ukrainians, you know, scattered around. But when the Ukrainian government attempted to get the strategic forces in their country to take that oath, the strategic forces pushed back.

And again, everything I have is from the DITRA history. I see no reason to sort of Depart from that. I mean, maybe some historian will come along who will discover that Hanoran got it all wrong, but they ended up, the rocket force's Pushed back and instead of taking the Ukrainian oath, were able to arrange to take an oath to the Commonwealth of Independent States.

So that sort of solved the problem in the near term of reconciling the fact that they were fundamentally loyal to Russia, but physically located in Ukraine and, you know, trying to navigate what was admittedly a difficult and trying situation.

Aaron 12:04

Yeah, I mean, I think the overall broader context is also one of a collapsed empire, you know, with garrison and bases that were further west than the sort of ultimate territory of the Russian Federation that emerged as the successor to the Soviet Union.

Jeffrey 12:21

Yeah, I mean, I think when I kind of look at the way that we talk about it now, you know, the situation at the time was confusing and fluid. And so it defies a simple explanation, although I think the explanation in the Ditcher Report is pretty damn good.

Aaron 12:38

No, it's very simple. Sorry, go ahead.

Jeffrey 12:40

But what that allows is for people today to refuse to understand the situation as people in the moment were experiencing it. So, you know, I don't think it was a live question in the minds of anyone in the strategic rocket forces. About which side they were going to pick. It was a complicated question of how do you pick your side while creating the least amount of trouble and difficulty.

But the big fundamental questions, I think, were answered. And it just was not going to be the case that the Ukrainians were going to be able to legally assert ownership over those systems. And if they seized them, and this is probably worth talking about, Simply physically seizing them does not a nuclear deterrent make.

Aaron 13:35

Yeah, I mean, we know a little bit about the weapons, right? You know, there's been some at least... Some information that have come out. I think we're calling them a defense industry memo that talks a little bit about the weapons themselves and how they had a shelf life. As a lot of nuclear weapons do themselves, they have components that decay.

I believe tritium is the one that decays the fastest, but it's been a while since I've been in that class. And so they do need regular maintenance and the Ukrainians weren't able to service them, or at least didn't have the infrastructure to service them. And we're going to come back to that later.

Jeffrey 14:08

Yeah, and here I should give credit to Marty Pfeiffer because he's the one who threw this thing up on Twitter and reminded me it existed. Vitaly Kataev, who was this Soviet figure whose papers are at Stanford and Pavel Podvig used to write a wonderful article about Soviet assessments of the hardness of their own silos and the window of vulnerability.

He also wrote a memo about this issue. And, you know, I think I often encounter this with people who are not technical. They sort of imagine that nuclear weapons are just kind of these, these bombs that require no maintenance and last forever. Which, like, they aren't. And they have limited life components. And Kataev goes through in some detail and talks about why Soviet nuclear weapons have a 12-year life expectancy, emphasizing both the decay of plutonium, which was a new argument to me, but then also something much more familiar, which is the decay of tritium.

And so the idea that even if the Ukrainians had seized these weapons, Kataev makes the point that most of them were five to eight years old. And they were nearing the end of their operational life, and that they themselves, that the Ukrainians had no capacity to maintain or service them, to say nothing of the delivery systems that one would need.

And he closes with a pretty salty remark, which is he sees things, you know, much as I do, which is that Ukraine is rather cleverly exploiting the fear that they might try to seize these weapons in order to elicit aid. And Kateev says, it would be advisable to stop asking Ukraine to transfer the nuclear warheads to Russia.

After some time, Ukraine itself will be asking us to do this, and it will have to pay for this transfer. So he was like, no, no, let him keep him. Let him have the problems. Let him struggle with them. And then they will have to pay us to take them away.

Aaron 16:15

I think some other broader context here, and before we pivot to the present, is Ukraine I think it's also undeniable at the time that as the Soviet Union collapsed, the fear was very real, particularly around site security at a lot of these places. So there was also a place to exploit this, not necessarily from bad faith, but also that there was a welcome audience that these places were sort of falling into decrepitude and the Soviet Union itself had fallen into decrepitude.

It had imploded and the Russian military that came after it was broke. You know, and so a lot of these operations and systems, they couldn't keep up to the level of sort of certainty that we had assumed, you know, basically up until when, like 1988, 87, somewhere along those lines. And so there was a real fear that they would lose some of these, right?

And you'd have, you know, sort of, what's that movie, The Sum of All Fears, you know, or a book, right?

Jeffrey 17:11

You have some sort of thing. Was it The Peacemaker, where Nicole Kidman pretends to be Jessica Stern?

Aaron 17:19

Yeah, you know, something like that. You know, these sort of like tropes and movie plots where one gets out on the market and, you know, some Russian buys it and then sells it to somebody and then all of a sudden you got boom.

Jeffrey 17:29

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of that stuff, even though you and I would dismiss it as being technically ill-informed, you know, the reality is that at the highest levels, the people making big decisions are not often technically informed. And so I think they worry about those things. And... There are a lot of things that can go wrong even if Ukraine couldn't have Taken those devices and fashioned them into a usable deterrent.

There would have just been the crisis created by trying to assert control. There would have been the anxiety created by the uncertainty about control. There would be fears about what had happened to the weapons and the materials. And even if none of that really materialized, you know, it would have a really detrimental effect. So it makes perfect sense to me The way that we handle the situation in the United States and generally the West, the idea of going in and providing assistance in order to eliminate these systems under the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, that was great.

But I do think that the resulting political rhetoric about it left people with the impression that we had solved a different problem, that we had solved a Ukrainian proliferation problem, rather than just simply effectively finding a way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world and to remove the kind of political problem that might result from a severe dispute about who really should control these things.

Aaron 19:03

Yeah, you know, exactly. I think it's important for people, one, I mean, either to listen to this podcast, or two, is to really familiarize themselves with the case. Because as we're staring down like a real war, you know, one of the many reasons Putin is throwing out now for why he may end up using force is that Ukraine could reconstitute itself.

You know, a nuclear weapons program or at least begin a nuclear weapons program and that they can build upon this legacy.

Jeffrey 19:39

I have the quote right here.

Aaron 19:41

There you go. I mean, it was buried in that sort of fascist speech he gave about blood and soil. But here we go.

Jeffrey 19:48

He says, since Soviet times, Ukraine has had fairly broad nuclear competencies. There are several nuclear units and the nuclear industry has developed quite widely and well, there are schools. Okay, man. And then he says that everything is there to solve this issue much faster than in those countries that solve these problems from scratch. There is only one thing missing.

Only uranium enrichment systems are missing. But this is a matter of technology. For Ukraine, this is not an unsolvable problem. So, first of all, the hand-wavy thing, like, not having an enrichment program is a pretty big thing to be missing. Yep. I mean, it's the key bottleneck. You know, and, you know, there is, of course, the alternative that one could go the plutonium route, but Ukraine's research reactors are not that big, and there is not a reprocessing capability.

But I think on enrichment, you know, what's really interesting here is Ukraine is reliant on Russia for fuel for its nuclear reactors. You know, the whole reason that there was this argument for an IAEA fuel bank was precisely because of situations of countries like Ukraine, which do not have the ability to enrich uranium and fabricate fuel. Two separate steps, I should be clear.

And therefore they have to rely on the market, and in particular, because the Ukrainian nuclear power plants are Soviet, they rely on Russia for providing fuel services. And so the whole idea of a fuel bank is because countries like that cannot easily stand up their own fuel production capabilities, and Russia could cut the Ukrainians off. Now the problem is the IAEA fuel bank is in Kazakhstan.

And it's kind of hard to get things in and out of Kazakhstan, particularly given where it's located, if the Russians are not enthusiastic about it. But this is also why the U.S. created its own fuel bank. And Ukraine loomed, I know for a fact, very large in the calculations of the American officials who thought about a fuel bank, precisely because they thought that it could supply a country like Ukraine more credibly than the IAEA fuel bank in Kazakhstan.

But that's the real world. If it were simple, as Putin goes on to say, then Ukraine would just start making its own fuel, but they can't. That would be a significant investment for them, and it would take a long time. And that's true for making fuel for reactors. It would be true for making nuclear material that would go into a nuclear weapon.

Aaron 22:36

Yeah. You know who I else think is influenced by this sort of like, I guess, mythologized or sort of like, I guess, rewritten part of history is I think Ukraine itself or Ukrainians in Ukraine. Are also impacted by this. Zelensky at the Munich security conference seemed to hint that they needed nuclear weapons themselves and they would no longer be bound by the Budapest memorandum because of the actions that Russia is taking.

Did you catch that? No, I didn't.

Jeffrey 23:10

But I think that's the Koch talking.

Aaron 23:13

Are we allowed to say that on the podcast?

Jeffrey 23:15

I mean, is he going to sue me for defamation?

Aaron 23:19

Hold on. Yeah, I mean, what I'm seeing is, is like basically the quote is, we'll have every right to believe that the Budapest memorandum, memorandum, is not working, and all the package of decisions of 1994 are in doubt, you know. And I think what he's talking about there, I don't like, is essentially that 1994 decision to give up the nuclear weapons that were on its territory. Yeah, I, you know, I think that.

Jeffrey 23:45

I do think this argument has taken hold, and it exists in the minds of people who don't really understand the technology. And at some point, what people want to believe matters more than what is true. So I can absolutely see an entire generation of Ukrainian leaders having seen all this Terrible public commentary, not really acquainting themselves with the facts, maybe not talking to Ukrainians who were there, or, you know, and sometimes officials change their story when they get old.

Just buying into this notion that they somehow possessed these weapons, that they had a viable path to turning that possession into an operational nuclear arsenal, and that they had traded it away. I mean, the Russians have convinced themselves that we promised not to expand NATO. Yeah. No, I mean, I... It's – Which I say is actually a much more – I'm being – That's a more nuanced argument.

That is a significantly more complicated question. I don't think we promised, but it's – it is ambiguous for sure.

Aaron 24:58

It's ambiguous. But what's not ambiguous, I think, is that Ukraine itself is not on the precipice of becoming a nuclear weapon state, nor was it a nuclear weapon state in any real shape or form because those weapons were under Russian or Soviet control. I think that's the point.

Jeffrey 25:16

Well, yeah. I mean, I would say it's two things. Those weapons are more like U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey than almost anything else. Which is to say that they are fundamentally foreign nuclear weapons stationed abroad. And yes, a government could assert its control, it could attempt to seize, and those things would cause a crisis, but that they are fundamentally foreign weapons.

But then the second thing is that Ukraine did not possess the capabilities it would need to maintain those weapons. Or to alter those weapons so that they could be used in a reasonable way, whether that's breaking the weapons apart, harvesting the plutonium and making new weapons, or whether it is developing the delivery systems that they would need in order to be able to credibly threaten and use those nuclear weapons.

I mean, you know, it just, it's a different kettle of fish.

Aaron 26:20

Final point on this, and I think we've hammered it, is one nuclear weapon does not a deterrent make. And this is not a podcast around building up arsenals, but I think it's worth thinking about. Given the bellicosity of the Russian position, particularly since 2014 around Ukraine, if there was any real hint of a nuclear weapons program... Given the timelines included, it simply would just hasten invasion.

It's just not a viable option to really think about and consider. I think people are fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea that there's not much to do here. There's no magic wand to stop this because of, I guess, the consequences involved in any such action themselves.

Jeffrey 27:08

I would make another point, but this is where I know I'm On a fairly sparsely populated island with this. It is not clear to me that Ukraine could credibly threaten Russia with a nuclear retaliation, precisely because what Russia has been so good at Is seizing bits and pieces. And so just like the UK did not use nuclear weapons against Argentina when it took the Falklands, and Israel did not use nuclear weapons against Egypt when it took the Sinai Peninsula, I don't think Ukraine could have used nuclear weapons to keep Russia from grabbing Crimea, or from recognizing and supporting the breakaway republics You know, it might work for like tanks rolling into Kiev.

But even then, I think it would be really complicated. But for the vast majority of scenarios... Russia has plenty of tools to grab pieces and to sow discord and to exploit the divisions in Ukrainian society and its armed forces so that nuclear weapons in this sense have almost become this kind of fantasy object that waves away all the problems they have.

That leave them vulnerable to the Russians. But they're not magic wands, you know? They're just weapons. And they've got a pretty limited utility. And so I think that one reason I find this whole argument so frustrating is not only is it not a choice that they really had, the power of the weapons has become a kind of, you know, object of wish fulfillment.

And that really distracts us from The real choices they had, and honestly, the choices that they have collectively made since that put them in this position. Which sucks for them, and I understand why people don't want to deal with reality when it's ugly and it sucks.

Aaron 29:21

But, you know, it is what it is. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I mean, if anything... You know, the Zelensky-Munich statement, while I think completely irrelevant to the overall crisis point that we're at, is reflective of that sort of mythologizing about nuclear weapons, or at least this idea that something must be on option to be able to stop a very powerful state from asserting sort of like military, from using military options, even though we don't agree with them.

And so it's just like there must be something you can do, right? But there really isn't. And so I don't think that's a happy note to end on, but it's where I've ultimately come down on the entirety of the analysis on this thing. But I'm happy we got to talk about why they don't actually have nuclear weapons or probably never did.

I'm always happy to talk to you, Aaron. All right. Well, Jeffrey, it's always good talking to you. Thanks for joining. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We'll stay on top of events. Head on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast, where the other side of this story is the OSINT story. And that is the community where if you want to be involved in open source work, and it also includes work on Ukraine, you can join that community for $3 a month.

Or if you're a student, $5 a month if you are normal. So join that community at patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And with that, peace out, everybody.