Iran, Ukraine, and the Global Nuclear Order

In the realm of nuclear nonproliferation, two important developments have been concurrently unfolding over the course of the past two years. One is the intense negotiation process between Iran and the P5+1 (the US, UK, China, Russia, France and Germany) to thwart the suspected Iranian nuclear weapons program. On July 14, 2015, the parties finally agreed on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which is now awaiting legislative approval of the signatory states.

The other important development is the continuing breach by Russia of the security assurances it pledged to Ukraine in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapons state. On December 5, 1994, Russia, together with the US and the UK, became the signatory of the so-called Budapest Memorandum whereby it undertook, among other things, to respect Ukraine’s borders and political independence, commitments it violated by annexing Crimea in March 2014, as well as by continuing to supply and support combatants in Eastern Ukraine.

The Iran deal and the Budapest Memorandum have at least two things in common. Firstly, they are both manifestations of the international community’s efforts to maintain and enforce the international nonproliferation regime designed to curb the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. Secondly, in both negotiations – with Ukraine and Iran – the United States has been the leading interlocutor. The US places nuclear nonproliferation among its topmost foreign policy goals and possesses the international political power to effectively pursue these goals. However, the differences between the cases of Ukraine in 1994 and Iran in 2015 are perhaps more interesting and certainly more significant in their repercussions for the global nuclear order.

Causes of Proliferation

The first point of difference concerns the sources and circumstances of proliferation in Iran and Ukraine. Iran, like most proliferators throughout history, had formulated an internal political demand for moving toward a nuclear weapons program. This demand stemmed from a combination of domestic politics, regional security and international prestige considerations. Concurrently, it proceeded to evade international inspectors and ultimately breach the international nonproliferation regime by engaging in covert enrichment and reprocessing activities, to a great extent with the help of Russian technology.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions date back to the times of the Shah. After the setbacks of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran recovered in the 1990s and began work on the indigenous nuclear fuel cycle that included plutonium separation, as well as uranium mining and enrichment activities. While Iran persistently denied that it was developing nuclear weapons, its determined pursuit of nuclear capabilities in defiance of international concerns implied that, at the very least, it intended to maintain a nuclear hedge, the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in a relatively short time. Despite continued efforts of the international community, including a rigorous sanctions regime, in the mid-2000s Tehran stepped up its suspicious nuclear activities. Today, it can produce enough weapons-grade uranium to make a bomb in a few months or even weeks.

In contrast to Iran, the cases of post-Soviet nuclear proliferation that included Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan differed starkly in that the supply of nuclear weapons preceded any political demand for them. These newly independent states became proliferators by a historical contingency, “inheriting” their nuclear arsenals from a collapsed nuclear superpower. In fact, before the fall of the USSR, both Belarus and Ukraine had expressed their intention to become non-nuclear states and join the NPT.

Belarus and, after a short hesitation, Kazakhstan had relinquished any claims to their nuclear inheritance and proceeded to join the NPT as non-nuclear weapons states. Ukraine alone contested Russia’s status as the sole nuclear heir in the post-Soviet realm. It claimed that as a successor state of the USSR on par with Russia, it was the rightful owner of what turned out to be the world’s third largest arsenal, a position that was largely misunderstood in the West and utterly dismissed in Russia.

Yet even in the thick of the ensuing contestation over the status and fate of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, the country’s political leaders never considered its nuclear inheritance in military terms. To begin with, in order to obtain an independent nuclear deterrent, Ukraine would have had to wrest operational control over its armaments from Moscow and further invest in developing a full nuclear fuel cycle and warhead production, which it did not possess. Ukraine had no economic or political resources to embark on such a program.

Ukraine’s controversial claim of nuclear “ownership” originated as part of its effort to reconstitute its relations with Moscow on a more equal footing and thus break the pattern Russian dominance in the region. Eventually, Ukraine mobilized this claim not to keep the weapons as a deterrent but to substantiate its demands for security guarantees and the financial compensation it felt entitled to in exchange for surrendering strategically important assets, including the fissile material contained in the warheads.

International Treaty Obligations

The second point of difference concerns the obligations of Kyiv and Tehran under the NPT. The NPT with its 189 party states is one of the most widely adhered to treaties in history and is the cornerstone of the international nonproliferation regime. The NPT recognizes five legitimate nuclear possessors: the US, UK, USSR/Russia, France, and China. All other states, by joining the treaty, relinquish their sovereign right to develop nuclear weapons.

The NPT recognizes the right of all states to develop a civilian nuclear program, such as nuclear energy or medical applications. Yet the uranium enrichment technology used in a civilian nuclear program is ultimately dual-use and could be easily channeled toward military purposes. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the organization responsible for verifying that all nuclear activities of the NPT member states stay peaceful. To accomplish this, the IAEA relies, to a significant extent, on the cooperation of states to disclose all relevant facilities and locations for inspection.

Iran has been a party to the NPT as a non nuclear-weapons state since the treaty came into force in 1970. In 2002, it was revealed that Iran evaded IAEA inspections by not disclosing secret nuclear facilities in Arak and Narantz. In 2005, IAEA found Iran in violation of the safeguards regime and a score of UN Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to halt its enrichment and reprocessing activities followed. All the while, Iran continued to insist that it had no desire for a nuclear weapon but that it has “the right to enrich” uranium that cannot be encroached upon by the West.  

Ukraine’s nuclear status, however, was far more ambiguous in international normative terms. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine was not party to the NPT and therefore was not bound by its norms. The West recognized only Russia as a successor state of the USSR in relation to the NPT, that is, as a legitimate nuclear possessor. For Ukraine to seek a recognized nuclear status within the NPT was simply inconceivable for a number of reasons. It would not only go against the main purpose of the treaty to limit the number of nuclear states, but also have repercussions for international order more broadly: it is not accidental that the five recognized nuclear possessors are also the P5 of the UN Security Council.

Some Ukrainian politicians advocated for retaining a temporary nuclear status outside of the NPT as leverage in its increasingly acrimonious relations with Russia. Yet Russia and the US made it clear that this would be a highly undesirable option and would spell isolation and economic sanctions for Ukraine. Thus, Ukraine was essentially held accountable to the nonproliferation norms, which it has not yet adopted. This was partly because Ukraine’s nuclear predicament came at a crucial time for the NPT. After four 5-year extensions, the treaty was due to be prolonged indefinitely at the 1995 Review Conference.  In 1993-1994, it became a top priority for the US to ensure that the NPT’s indefinite extension goes through (which it did) and that the dubious status of the former Soviet republics in relation to the treaty was viewed as damaging to the process.

Political pressure on the nuclear possessors outside of the NPT is by no means a rule in international relations. Israel and later India and Pakistan managed to develop nuclear capability outside of the treaty, and these proliferations went not only unsanctioned but became eventually normalized, in particular by the 2005 US-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation deal. In 1994, as Ukraine was signing away its nuclear arsenal, the US concluded the so-called “Agreed Framework” with North Korea, the country that had blackmailed the international community with the withdrawal from the NPT a year earlier.  This deal eased sanctions and pledged to supply two light-water reactors to North Korea in exchange for Pyongyang’s commitment to freeze and dismantle its clandestine nuclear weapons program. North Korea breached the agreement, withdrew from the NPT anyway in 2003 and in 2006 tested its first nuclear weapon.

Nor does the current nuclear deal with Iran, which has been accountable under the NPT all the while, completely eradicate the possibility of the Iranian weapons program. Rather it significantly diminishes the total number of centrifuges used for enriching uranium from about 19,000 to 6,000 and thereby extends the breakout time from a few months to over a year. It also imposes a regime of inspections and verifications that is both thorough and intrusive if carried out as agreed. Yet the agreement has an expiration date: many of the measures designed to thwart Iranian capacity to produce a bomb will expire in 10 to 15 years. Supporters of the Iranian deal maintain that this time window will give the US the opportunity to engage with some of the underlying security issues in the Middle East that drive Iran toward the bomb in the first place.

Relations with the West

This leads to the third and perhaps most important difference between Ukraine and Iran: how the nuclear question correlates with the nature of their relations with the West. Since 1979, Iran has been run by a theocratic regime that claims for their state a role of regional leader and defines itself broadly in opposition to Western mores and the Western-led international order. If the Islamic Republic’s trademark chant “Death to America!” is any indication, the US is regarded with particular animosity for its record of meddling in Iranian affairs and in the Middle East more broadly.

Given the history of the US-Iranian relations as well as the complexities and general state of upheaval in the Middle East, it seems too optimistic to suppose that the US can turn itself into Iran’s ally in a decade’s time, or otherwise meaningfully address the underlying factors that make Iran desire the bomb. Iranian and Russian politicians have already lauded the JCPOA as a victory over the West. The Russians have also resumed negotiation of arms sales to Iran that the deal is due to unfreeze.

Ukraine, on the other hand, as a new sovereign state, wanted to join the Western-led international order on good terms, rather than defy it. Much of Ukraine’s pro-independence discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s urged Ukraine’s return to Europe after long subjugation by Soviet totalitarianism and Russian Eurasianism. At the same time, increasingly perceiving a threat of border revisionism from Russia, Ukraine demanded robust security guarantees from the West in exchange for surrendering its nuclear weapons. Ukrainian leaders negotiated hard to obtain such guarantees that included pledges from the West to come to Ukraine’s aid in case it comes under threat (by Russia) in a legally binding form.

At the time, however, the West balked at undertaking such far-reaching commitments toward a new and little-known country, a move that would have had the additional disadvantage of provoking a negative reaction from Russia. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum thus contained only general political assurances to respect international borders and political independence of Ukraine. These were reiterated verbatim from the UN Charter and the 1975 Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Memorandum also included nuclear-related assurances extended by all NPT nuclear weapons states to all NPT non nuclear-weapons states.

Following the signing of the Memorandum, Ukraine proceeded with the dismantlement of its nuclear weapons capability quickly and smoothly, completing it ahead of schedule by June 1996. Since its denuclearization, Ukraine became a compliant member of the nonproliferation regime: it has eagerly opened its civilian nuclear facilities to the IAEA inspections and eventually surrendered the remaining 234 kilograms of highly enriched uranium as part of the deal agreed at 2010 Nuclear Security Summit.

In Sum: Repercussions for Nuclear Order

Iran and Ukraine are thus two very different cases of nuclear (non)proliferation. Iran is a suspected serial violator of the NPT that has repeatedly evaded international efforts to verify that its nuclear intentions are peaceful, all the while engaging in anti-Western rhetoric. Despite the sanctions regime, its nuclear weapons capability is nearly a fait accompli. From this standpoint, the deal which does not definitively preclude it from developing the bomb is indeed a good one, given the alternatives: an almost certain Iranian nuclear bomb or military action against it by the West.

Meanwhile, Ukraine, a new sovereign state, that inadvertently became the world’s third largest nuclear power in breach of no international norm and tried to balance its security concerns with its desire to join international community on good terms, ultimately ended up with a deal that disarmed it completely in exchange for nonbinding assurances.  One would be excused in assuming that such a deal would have been hardly possible if, by a historical fluke, it were present-day Iran and not then-Ukraine that ended up with 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 44 strategic bombers, and some 1800 strategic and 1600 tactical nuclear warheads.

The terms of the Budapest Memorandum have been blatantly violated by Russia when it annexed Crimea in March 2014 and continued to undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty by supplying arms and troops to separatist combatants in Eastern Ukraine. The letter of the Memorandum does not specify aid to Ukraine in case of its breach. However, given the international pressure mounted on Ukraine in the 1990s and the refusal of great powers to take its security concerns – which proved all too real – seriously, the spirit of the Memorandum certainly demands more than the letter. Acting upon Congressional mandate to supply badly needed lethal defensive arms to Ukraine would begin to fulfill the spirit of the Budapest Memorandum.

Since Russian aggression and the West’s unfortunate slow response to it, a troubling number of Ukraine’s politicians voiced bitter regret for relinquishing the country’s nuclear arsenal and called for rearmament.1Undoubtedly, such a move would not only be unrealistic, given Ukraine’s dire finances, but also extremely ill-considered. Nuclear rearmament would provoke hostility from the West at a time when Ukraine needs Western support more than ever. A more prudent policy on Ukraine’s part would be to turn a perceived negative into a positive: mobilize its own example to proactively champion the cause of nonproliferation and disarmament, a policy that would seek to keep Russia’s future cooperation with Iran in close scrutiny. 

On the other hand, the West and especially the US as the primary guardian of the nonproliferation regime should consider the lessons that this comparison of Ukraine and Iran bears out. The global nuclear nonproliferation order is a system guided by rules, patterns and methods. It will endure only if cohesion, not coercion, is the primary method of sustaining the system. The benefits of selfish defiance cannot outweigh the benefits of cooperation for the sake of global nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. The West must seek to encourage and reward its like-minded partners and allies that share its nonproliferation goals and cooperate toward their achievement as much as it seeks to restrain proliferators that repeatedly defy them.

1.For instance, Pavlo Rizanenko, an MP from the moderate “Udar” party, called Ukraine’s denuclearization a “big mistake” in his March 2014 interview to USA Today and called for a “stronger” Ukraine with nuclear weapons. Another moderate MP Serhiy Kaplin registered a bill in the parliament to withdraw from the NPT. Volodymyr Ohryzko, Ukraine’s foreign minister in 2007-2009, also called for Ukraine’s withdrawal from the NPT and renewal of its nuclear status. In addition, the leader of the nationalist party “Svoboda” Oleh Tyahnybok and the director of a Kyiv political think-tank Oleh Soskin have advocated nuclear rearmament. A survey conducted in late March 2014 by the Ukrainian Institute of Regional Development showed that over 80% of Ukrainians supported nuclear rearmament.