😍 Understand why only Russia inherited the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union 👍 Noticias RTV

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In July of that year, shortly after the end of the communist bloc, Russia and the US signed the agreement called Start 1 (an acronym in English for “strategic reduction of the threat of weapons”), which, among other things, dealt with on the reduction, on both sides, of the nuclear arsenal of the countries.

Months later, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus signed an agreement to create a shared command between the countries of the Soviet atomic loot.

But the folder with the most secret details (such as the codes that authorized the launch of the warheads) was passed directly by Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet leader and who commanded the end of the bloc, to Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian president.

Therefore, although the term determined that the launch of warheads required a common agreement between the four countries, the power to “push the button” was concentrated in Russia.

Then-US Secretary of State James Baker later recounted to Forbes magazine an excerpt from a conversation with Yeltsin: “[Ele] they said they [Ucrânia, Cazaquistão e Belarus] they believed they would have nuclear weapons, when in fact they never would.”

US interest

Such a disagreement could lead to a problem of nuclear proportions. And, in that sense, the US, as the other great atomic power in the world, acted so that the solution to the problem also served its interests, as Baker reveals in the same interview.

“We really wanted to deal with one country, not all four. We didn’t want to end up with four more countries with nuclear weapons,” she said.

Thus, already in May 1992, the four countries and the US signed the Lisbon Protocol, which not only included Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus in the START 1 agreement, but also named these three as non-nuclear states already Russia as a nuclear state.

It was the first step towards the concentration of the arsenal by the Russians.

The case of Ukraine

Each of the countries carried out their efforts for the transfer of weapons.

The only requirement was that everything be finished by 1997, because that was the year that a good part of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was in force, when it already needed to be in the care of Russia to avoid a catastrophe.

Kazakhstan made an exchange of atomic weapons for non-atomic weapons as early as 1992. Belarus gave up its arsenal and received security guarantees in return; Currently, the country is even reviewing its non-nuclear position alleging a threat that the neighboring nations of NATO, such as Poland, store missiles of this type.

Ukraine was more reluctant to give up its arsenal. It signed the Budapest Memorandum (a document to which, in addition to the states mentioned, the United Kingdom is also a signatory) with the conditions of the transfer only in 1994 and already under internal resistance from some of its politicians.

Volodymir Tolubko, a former soldier and later a member of parliament, said the decision was premature and that the Ukrainians should keep some of the weapons as a way to deter possible invasions.