Rethinking the Budapest Memorandum from the Perspective of Ukrainian-Russian Relations in the Post-Soviet Period

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-50
Author(s):  
Alina Shymanska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Ukrainian Crisis ◽  
Post Soviet Period

The Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine was adopted in 1990 and declared Ukraine a non-nuclear state. However, Kyiv was not eager to surrender the nuclear arsenal that it had inherited from the Soviet Union. It is possible to divide Ukraine’s denuclearisation process into two different phases. The first phase consisted of bilateral discussions between Russia and Ukraine, which ended due to Russia’s inability to understand Ukraine’s security concerns. In 1993, the United States joined the discussion, and the trilateral phase began. The involvement of the United States helped to reach a consensus and promote nuclear non-proliferation in Ukraine by providing security assurance and some economic benefits. The case of Ukraine’s nuclear non-proliferation was supposed to be one of the most exemplary cases of denuclearisation in the last two decades. But in light of the Ukrainian crisis which started in 2014, the world recognizes that the security assurances provided in the Budapest Memorandum ultimately failed to deter Russian aggression towards Ukraine. Scott Sagan believes that the international norms and an image of ‘a good international citizen’ that can integrate into the Western economic and security system while maintaining good relations with Russia mattered the most in view of Ukraine's decision to give up nuclear weapons. This article suggests that the Ukrainian denuclearisation is the fusion of both the norms and domestic factors that Ukraine faced in 1990s. The article will review Ukraine’s decision to return the nuclear weapons, despite the ongoing Russian threat. It will also clarify Ukraine’s decision to not pursue nuclear proliferation, despite recent trends within Ukraine’s political circle that would be in support of this decision.

China’s Relations with Russia

2020 ◽  
pp. 233-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexei D. Voskressenski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
Post Soviet Period

Russia’s relations with China (and vice versa) have evolved steadily during the post-Soviet period. Leaders on both sides have proclaimed, for a number of years now, that their bilateral relations are at their best point in history. How did the China-Russia relationship reach such a stage, especially given their long (and largely discordant) history? This chapter traces the evolution of China-Russia relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It identifies the commonalities and common purposes Moscow and Beijing have in world affairs, as well as their bilateral economic, cultural, and military relations. The China-Russia relationship has important implications for the United States, as well as American allies in the world.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Trial Balloons

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-105
Author(s):  
Simon Miles
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Force ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
East And West ◽  
General Secretary

This chapter is devoted to Konstantin Chernenko' efforts to shift superpower relations back to a détente-like footing during his time as a General Secretary of the Soviet Union. It examines attempts on the part of various Western leaders to carve out a role for themselves as the superpowers' chosen intermediary. It also investigates the balance of power between East and West, including how and why leaders in Washington and Moscow perceived and responded to each other as they did. The chapter analyzes the nuclear freeze movement, which has remained a political force to be reckoned with as the movement called for both superpowers to halt the construction and deployment of nuclear weapons. It talks about the freeze activists in the United States who shepherded the passage of nonbinding resolutions that support their cause in four state legislatures, the House, and the Senate.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

15. The Return to Confrontation, 1979–80

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Short Range ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Slow Progress ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter examines why the United States and the Soviet Union returned to confrontation during the period 1979–1980. Despite the slow progress of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), there were at least some efforts to control strategic weapons. Short-range and intermediate-range nuclear weapons, in contrast, continued to grow in number and sophistication, particularly in Europe, where NATO and Warsaw Pact forces still prepared for war against each other, despite détente. The failure to control theatre nuclear weapons led to a new twist in the European arms race at the end of the 1970s which helped to undermine recent improvements in East–West relations. The chapter first considers NATO’s ‘dual track’ decision regarding theatre nuclear weapons before discussing the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. It concludes with an assessment of the revival of the Cold War, focusing on the so-called Carter Doctrine.

Rational Superiority, Crises, and Arms Control, 1961–1963

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Test Ban

Chapter 1 describes how John F. Kennedy rose to power by articulating his own new nuclear strategy, which would use the latest advances in social and organizational sciences, combined with US superiority in nuclear weapons, to defend the United States’ national security interests. The foremost exponent of this strategy of “rational superiority” was Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The chapter then explains how this scheme was dealt a series of blows by Kennedy’s experiences during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, which disabused him of the idea that nuclear superiority could be used to coerce the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration used the rhetoric of rational superiority to advance the Limited Test Ban Treaty and was planning to employ it as part of the president’s reelection campaign in 1964. Kennedy had not reconciled this gap between his public rhetoric and personal doubts at the time of his death.

The future unlike the past: nuclear proliferation and American security policy

1981 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nacht
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nuclear Arms Control

An examination of the past relationships between nuclear proliferation and American security policy substantiates several propositions. First, the political relationship between the United States and each new nuclear weapon state was not fundamentally transformed as a result of nuclear proliferation. Second, with the exception of the Soviet Union, no new nuclear state significantly affected U.S. defense programs or policies. Third, American interest in bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations has been confined to the Soviet Union. Fourth, a conventional conflict involving a nonnuclear ally prompted the United States to intervene in ways it otherwise might not have in order to forestall the use of nuclear weapons.In all respects, however, the relationship between nuclear proliferation and American security policy is changing. The intensification of the superpower rivalry and specific developments in their nuclear weapons and doctrines, the decline of American power more generally, and the characteristics of nuclear threshold states all serve to stimulate nuclear proliferation. It will be increasingly difficult in the future for American security policy to be as insulated from this process as it has been in the past.

Historical and textual research and essence analysis of the evolution of Lenin’s “German Spy” case

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (02) ◽  
pp. 32-49
Author(s):  
Li Yan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
New Materials ◽  
German Government ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Russian Media ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Textual Research

The rumors that Lenin was a “German spy” first appeared in Petrograd after the February revolution in Russia. During the Soviet period, the “Sisson documents” (papers) were fabricated in the United States and other Western countries, and other evidence was sought that Lenin was allegedly an “agent” of the German government. However, all the evidence presented were convincingly refuted. V. I. Lenin’s “German spy” case was discussed again during the collapse of the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia. In some Russian media, political and academic circles, this “case” was reproduced in various forms, but new materials and new evidences were not found.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency

1970 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
George H. Quester
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Atomic Energy Agency ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Atomic Energy ◽  
Energy Agency ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist China

The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have put forward a Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons beyond those five nations which currently possess them: France, the People's Republic of China (Communist China), the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The treaty requires that signatories already possessing such weapons not give them to other countries and that signatories not yet posses-sing nuclear weapons forego accepting them or manufacturing them indigenously. To reinforce the latter restraint the treaty obligates states renouncing weapons to accept inspection safeguards on their peaceful nuclear activities, inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (01) ◽  
pp. 24-32
Author(s):  
Michael Mandelbaum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
First Time

Of all modern machines, indeed of all the artifacts of modern culture, the bomb is the most frightening. It is the most dangerous of all human inventions. The American, European, and Soviet people have always known how dangerous it is. They have, nevertheless, left nuclear weapons in the hands of the nuclear priesthood. (In the Soviet Union this has not been a matter of choice.) In the 1980s some in the West resolved to take control of the bomb. They began to demand that disarmament replace deterrence as the principal nuclear business of the Atlantic alliance.Probably from 1945 onward the average American or European would, if asked, have said that he wanted to do away with all nuclear arsenals rather than refine or increase them. But the average Westerner was not asked, and did not say so, at least not in any way that influenced public policy. In the 1980s citizens of the West did begin to say so, publicly, loudly, and in growing numbers. For the first time, a mass movement dedicated to shaping the nuclear future appeared on both sides of the Atlantic.In this, as in other things, the North American and the European wings of NATO differ. Opposition to the alliance's nuclear weapons policies made itself known earlier in Europe than in the United States. Both European and American anti-nuclear weapons activists aimed ultimately to lift the nuclear siege that the world must endure as long as these weapons exist. But each rallied around a more immediate issue, and the issues were different. The Europeans opposed the stationing of 572 intermediate-range missiles on the continent, which the NATO governments deemed necessary to offset comparable Soviet weapons. In the United States a proposal to freeze the deployment, testing, and manufacture of all weapons by both superpowers attracted wide support.

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