Failure of Budapest Memorandum could push South Korea and Taiwan to seek their own nuclear deterrent

Nuclear non-proliferation and preventing war, stopping or even reversing the spread of nuclear weapons across the world and preventing the invasion of one country by another, is right up there with doing something about climate change in terms of guaranteeing a future that includes safety and security for the people of our planet.

Right now we are engaged in negotiations with Iran, for example. Since Trump stupidly and single-handedly pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal, we and the other countries negotiating the deal – Britain, France, China, Germany, Russia, and the U.S., are trying to assure Iran that we will protect them in the event, say, Saudi Arabia or Israel decide to try to take them out.

It is not going so well, and part of the reason is the failure of the “Budapest Memorandum” of 1994, an agreement worked out just three years after the Soviet Union dissolved and Ukraine again became an independent nation.

Through much of that year the U.K., U.S., and Russia met repeatedly with Ukraine through a venue in Budapest provided and blessed by the U.N. to try to secure and remove from Ukraine the world’s third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Ukraine had inherited from the old Soviet Union a massive collection of nukes, including almost two thousand SS-19 and SS-24 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Between 1991 and 1994, Ukraine had the world’s third largest nuclear weapons arsenal.

Each of those thousands of missiles had warheads containing nuclear bombs in the 400-550 kiloton range: each missile’s warhead was 27 to 37 times more powerful than the weapons we used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This Ukrainian stash of nuclear weapons was six times the size of what China has today, capable of destroying — both because of the missiles’ ranges and the size of the warheads — every town and city in the United States with more than 50,000 people, as The Brookings Institution notes, “three times over, with warheads left to spare.”

Most were pre-targeted at the United States, but these missiles — and the long-range jets and nuclear bombs Ukraine had as well — could just as easily been repositioned to take out Moscow and every major population center in Russia, or every consequential city in Britain and continental Europe, with plenty of firepower left over.

The U.S., U.K., and Russia — on behalf of the United Nations and the world — really, really wanted those nuclear weapons to be secured. Ukraine was more than willing to give them up — particularly after being so traumatized by the meltdown of their Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986 — so they entered the Budapest negotiations in good faith with only three simple demands.

• First, they wanted an absolute assurance from, at least, the U.S., U.K., and Russia that their territorial integrity would be both respected by those three nations and defended in the event of an invasion by a third party.
• Second, Ukraine wanted some financial help to safely dig the missiles out of their bunkers and transport them to Russia for decommissioning and destruction. The job would cost more than Ukraine’s economy could bear at the time.
• Third, they still had 15 functioning nuclear reactors operating in Ukraine, a legacy of the Soviet nuclear power program (which also provided some of the materials for those 1900 nukes), and the nuclear material in the warheads could be reprocessed into high-quality fuel for Ukraine’s power stations. They wanted an equivalent amount of nuclear fuel from the U.S., U.K., and Russia so they could provide themselves with low-cost electricity for a few decades.

The three nations negotiating with Ukraine agreed to all the terms:

• Russia took most of the responsibility for relocating and decommissioning the ICBMs and their nuclear warheads, and providing Ukraine with nuclear power-station fuel.
• The U.S. and the U.K. kicked in around $3 billion cash to cover the costs.
• And all three nations kicked in to an additional $3 billion fund to pay for a modern Ukrainian military and promised to never attack Ukraine and to defend its borders if anybody else did.

Ukraine, trusting our word that their borders would never be violated, gave up their nuclear weapons. All of them.

We can all see how poorly that memorandum, signed in Budapest on December 5, 1994, has worked out. So can Iran. And Pakistan. And North Korea. And so can any other “small” country thinking that possessing nukes may let it punch above its weight when it comes to defending itself against hostile land-grabs from neighbors. Like Taiwan.

The memorandum doesn’t have specific language about exactly how the U.S., U.K., and Russia would protect Ukraine and its borders in the event of an attack, but it was backed up by at least the appearance of the moral force of the United Nations.

It does, however, contain language that the Ukrainians were convinced would protect them. In it, the U.S., U.K. and Russia “reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”

The three nations and, by proxy, the U.N., additionally promised to “refrain from economic coercion” against Ukraine and, should things break down, to “seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine” if any nation were to initiate an “act of aggression” against Ukraine. But nowhere does it say exactly what that “assistance” would look like.

By 1996 Ukraine was completely denuclearized, weapons-wise, and until 2014 thought they were safe as the country blossomed into a western-Europe-like vibrant regulated capitalist economy, having twice rejected attempts by political elites to corrupt the government as they built a sturdy middle class and a technologically modern nation.

That legal-language ambiguity, however, provided both the U.S. and the U.K. with wiggle room when Russia annexed Crimea back in 2014. Ukraine went before the UN and, citing the Budapest Memorandum, demanded the world act to protect its territory from Russian aggression.

The world, not wanting to piss off Putin and having only the weakest of assurance language in the memorandum, passed on doing anything and let Russia get away with the land grab.

In the past months President Zelensky has repeatedly referenced the Budapest Memorandum when demanding the world — or at least the U.S. and United Kingdom — keep their agreement to guarantee the integrity of Ukraine’s borders. On February 19, as Russia was massing troops along the Ukrainian border, President Zenensky told the Munich Security Conference:

“Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success. Today Ukraine will do it for the fourth time.

“I, as President, will do this for the first time. But both Ukraine and I are doing this for the last time. I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was commissioned to convene them.

“If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.”

President Zelensky mentioned it most recently on March 4, as the Russian invasion turned into an orgy of slaughter, when he said to the world:

“All the alliance has managed to do so far is to carry 50 tons of diesel fuel for Ukraine through its procurement system probably so that we can burn the Budapest Memorandum.”

As the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch-owned publication that had previously supported Trump in his repeated sucking up to Putin, noted in an opinion piece published on  February 22:

“Don’t be surprised if Japan or South Korea seek their own nuclear deterrent. If Americans want to know why they should care about Ukraine, nuclear proliferation is one reason. Betrayal has consequences, as the world seems destined to learn again the hard way.”

The crisis caused by the failure of the Budapest Memorandum today and in 2014 has been terrible for Ukraine and has now damaged Russia by its own hand, both militarily, economically and in their standing among the nations of the world.

But that failure has not been ignored by other nations of the world, and is, at this moment, almost certainly at the heart of conversations being held in the highest levels of dozens of wannabee nuclear nations around the world.

As the Russian rape of Ukraine continues, the world’s nations and their body, the United Nations, must take the lesson of the failure of the Budapest Memorandum to heart.

We need new and stronger agreements — cemented into law as treaties with explicit language about trigger points and consequences — around the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons and respecting the territorial integrity of nations. World War I metastasized across the continent of Europe because, in part, of the ambiguity and varying interpretations of mutual-defense agreements among nations in the region following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo.

The United States and our allies must push the United Nations to convene a new round of negotiations leading to solid and unambiguous treaties that will prevent — or quickly and severely bring the world together to punish — any other rogue nation from invading a nearby state whose land and resources it covets.