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- [00:00]
Commercial Narrator
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- [01:00]
Martin DeCaro
as it happens April 28, 2026. Chair Noble 40 years on.
- [01:07]
Narrator/Reporter
It took a full 18 days before the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made any public pronouncement on the nuclear disaster returnable. Soviet television repeated the claim that only two people have died. They assured viewers all is under control. 1 23:45 Explosion. The first word that something was seriously wrong came from this power plant in eastern Sweden, where workers coming on the job registered abnormal high levels of radiation on their.
- [01:32]
Mariana Boodrin
Forty years ago, this was the most dangerous place on Earth. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
- [01:38]
Martin DeCaro
April 1986. The largest ever accidental release of nuclear radiation scarred Ukraine, contaminating the earth and exposing the rot in the Soviet system. It changed the course of history. Chernobyl is not only a place on a map, it's a synonym for death and destruction and the terrible legacy of the ussr. And today, Putin's war is putting the place at risk again. That's next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:05]
Mariana Boodrin
Ukraine says a Russian attack has significantly damaged the radiation shelter over the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
- [02:12]
Narrator/Reporter
This is a byproduct of almost nightly Russian drone and missile attack.
- [02:17]
Mariana Boodrin
And this essentially inaugurated what became known as the policy of glasnost, of openness. Right. We can openly criticize the regime, have this open discussion, but immediately it was absorbed into the general feeling of dissatisfaction with the regime in general that was failing to provide economically for its people. That was repressive, dysfunctional in so many other ways. And this only served to make this more acute for most of the affected people, not just anti nuclear sentiment, but anti institutional, anti Soviet sentiment.
- [02:55]
Martin DeCaro
Most Americans have probably never heard of Chernobyl in northeastern Ukraine until turning on their televisions in the days after April 26, 1986.
- [03:04]
Narrator/Reporter
There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the Soviets have admitted that it happened. The Soviet version is this. One of the atomic reactors at the Chernobyl atomic power plant near the city of Kiev was damaged. And there is speculation in Moscow that people were injured.
- [03:18]
Martin DeCaro
Confusion and secrecy eventually gave way to the realization that an epic nuclear disaster had taken place. Two huge explosions blew the 11000 ton roof off one of the plant's reactors, reactor number four, releasing 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
- [03:35]
Narrator/Reporter
And as tests were conducted, similar puzzling reports of high radiation came in from all over Scandinavia. But still no accidents were reported, leading to the conclusion that the problem was elsewhere.
- [03:46]
Martin DeCaro
Dozens died in the immediate explosion and its aftermath from extreme radiation exposure. That included many firefighters who were sent there to contain the damage. In the years to come, related cancers would kill thousands more. No one is sure exactly how many.
- [04:02]
Narrator/Reporter
Gorbachev said it's important to remember a nuclear war would be far more devastating than what happened at Chernobyl. And he announced new action to underline his concern. The Soviet government, weighing all the circumstances,
- [04:14]
Martin DeCaro
and it would also create an uninhabitable zone running for miles around the old nuclear reactors, leaving ghost towns behind. Citizens were evacuated, never to return. Today, a new problem. As the New York Times reports, Russia's invasion in 2022 harmed efforts to contain radiation in many ways. Moscow's forces occupied the crippled nuclear power station and used it as a staging area for attacks on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Early in the war, their heavy armored vehicles stirred up small amounts of radioactive dust. More worrisome, says the report, are longer term war risks. Scientists cannot wells that measure groundwater radiation, lest they step on a landmine. Also, owing to mines, firefighters cannot rush to extinguish wildfires that spread radiation in smoke. In February last year, Russia flew an exploding Iranian designed shahed drone into the gigantic steel shell that encloses an older rickety structure built over the ruined reactor. Shortly after the accident, that older structure, known as the sarcophagus, is at risk of collapsing and releasing radiation overnight.
- [05:20]
Narrator/Reporter
A Russian drone has hit the damaged Chernobyl nucle power plant. According to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The video shows the very moment. Look at that flash, the drone hit radiation background limits have remained Normal.
- [05:35]
Martin DeCaro
So Chernobyl, not just a place on a map. It changed the course of history. It influenced a generation of Ukrainians who decide to relinquish the nuclear weapons left on their territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a decision that some now regret.
- [05:50]
Narrator/Reporter
You have blazed a path ahead on the two most critical issues for the future, economic reform and nuclear weapons. Thanks to your leadership, Ukraine is making the hard choices that will ensure the prosperity Ukrainians deserve.
- [06:09]
Martin DeCaro
Mariana Boodrin was there 40 years ago. Today she is a senior researcher at the center for Nuclear Security Policy at MIT Security Studies Program and the author of Inheriting the the Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine. We discussed her book on the podcast when it was published in 2023. Hello again, Mariana Booden.
- [06:31]
Mariana Boodrin
Thank you so much for having me.
- [06:33]
Martin DeCaro
Where were you, Mariana, in April 1986?
- [06:38]
Mariana Boodrin
I was a schoolgirl back then in Western Ukraine, in the city of Lviv, in third or fourth grade. We had school on Saturdays back then. It was a short day and I was making my way to school. On April 26th, unbeknownst to any of us, the reactor number four had blown up at 1:30 or 1:23am that very morning. None of us were informed about this, not even people in Kyiv. That was only some 50 miles, 60 miles from the nuclear power plant.
- [07:14]
Martin DeCaro
You were far from the incident. Lviv, for those who may not know, is on the western side of Ukraine.
- [07:20]
Narrator/Reporter
Correct.
- [07:20]
Mariana Boodrin
But that for radiation, these distances are not exactly that far away. In fact, radiation from Chernobyl nuclear power plant was first reported and detected in Sweden at the Swedish nuclear power plant on Sunday morning, very shortly after the accident. And because of the northwesterly winds, much of the radiation blew over northern Europe, as far afield as Britain and Ireland.
- [07:52]
Martin DeCaro
How was it possible that this didn't instantaneously become international news?
- [07:58]
Mariana Boodrin
Well, radiation was detected. It was reported to the iea, because at the time, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency was Hans Blix. He was a Swede himself. And he got a call on that same day from his colleagues back in Sweden saying, we're detecting really high radiation levels, but we don't know what happened. But none of the states that were members of the iea, of course, the Soviet Union was a member state, a founding member, had reported any accidents. So, you know, how do you trace the source of this radiation to where in the Soviet Union? The information space was really tightly controlled by the system. I mean, all of the media was state owned media. Immediately there was kind of the regime of secrecy. This was this muscle memory, right? It was this instinct of the system to hush things down. Right. All the workers that were at the plant at the time had to sign confidentiality statements. You know, special delegation, likely KGB folks, arrived from Moscow right away, packaged all of the documents from the nuclear power plant into bags and took them to Moscow. So not even the remaining operators could, with full confidence, reconstruct what happened.
- [09:22]
Martin DeCaro
Oh, my gosh.
- [09:23]
Mariana Boodrin
There was still another three reactors of the same type. They were shut down, emergency shut down after the accident on the reactor number four. But yet you still have to establish what exactly had happened. And the operators of the plant had no access to the information. The civilians were not informed. So May 1st was the Soviet Labor Day. It was the time of great big mass demonstrations that were orchestrated. Children, adults, were marching with all these Soviet flags and praises to the Soviet working class. And all of that. All of that still went ahead. So people were exposed. With the authorities in Moscow knowing full well what had happened, people were exposed to these high doses of radiation where the instructions should have been, stay indoors, do not go outside, take these precautions, and so forth.
- [10:20]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I was about to say this was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb falling on Chernobyl. I want to talk about what actually happened there, but I want to ask you about your own family's experiences or just your own family's attitudes towards the system, because, yes, I asked you, how was this not instantaneous news even in 1986? Well, the government tried to cover it up. And had it just been like a factory explosion, it would have worked. The problem here was radiation spreading all over the European continent. An accident is followed by a crime. You were a schoolgirl in 1986. I was a schoolboy. I remember hearing about Chernobyl for the first time around here. And I probably didn't know where Chernobyl was. It was somewhere in that bad place we called the Soviet Union. But I do remember seeing Gorbachev's photo in those days and remembering the birthmark on his head. And just Chernobyl became synonymous with this historic incident rather than the name of a place that no one really had thought of prior. What did your family think of the Soviet system?
- [11:22]
Mariana Boodrin
Well, Western Ukraine was always somewhat unique and different than other parts of the of Soviet Ukraine and possibly the Soviet Union more broadly. Where I'm from, the city of Lviv and the surrounding region was annexed to the Soviet Union only in 1939 as a result of the German Soviet Pact of Non Aggression, where, you know, the two states invaded and divided Poland from the part of Ukraine that used to be part of interwar Poland. And of course, the Soviet Union had less of a time to work and repress and disseminate and russify this part of Ukraine. So the national consciousness, as it were, and the memories, the lived memory, was still very much alive in western Ukraine, and it would become the hotbed of the pro independence movement in the late 1980s. And this is also to say that Chernobyl, as you correctly mentioned, was just too big to hide. The initial instinct, the initial move of the system was to cover up, but it was impossible, right? And there were plenty of accidents, including radiological events in the Soviet Union that have been covered up. You know, major spills, major radiation releases that were too far in land. Right. Somewhere in Siberia that they weren't detected outside, and local people suffered. There was still no acknowledgment that it was even happening. This was not so with Chernobyl. And this new leader whom you mentioned, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was reform minded, or at least that's how he presented himself, his initial instinct too was to cover up when it turned out that it's impossible. International community was aware that there was a radiological release and became very clear that it was somewhere in the Soviet Union. He did eventually come out. It wasn't until, you know, the first week of May, I think, when he made a very brief statement, but statement nevertheless, that there was, you know, this tragedy that happened in the Soviet Union and we're dealing with the consequences.
- [13:35]
Narrator/Reporter
The Soviet leaders first public comment on Chernobyl let off the nationally broadcast evening news. We were recently stricken by a disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear power accident. It deeply affected the Soviet people and disturbed world opinion. The accident, he told his countrymen, has now claimed nine lives and injured 299 others. He tried to explain what went wrong. The power of the reactor suddenly increased. There was a considerable discharge of steam, and the subsequent reaction led to the formation of hydrogen, its explosion and the destruction.
- [14:11]
Mariana Boodrin
And this essentially inaugurated what became known as the policy of glasnost, of openness, Right. That we can openly criticize the regime, have this open discussion. Right. So Chernobyl gave the impetus for that sort of policy, but immediately it was absorbed into the general feeling of dissatisfaction with the regime in general. Sure, that was failing to provide economically for its people. That was repressive, dysfunctional in so many other ways. And this only served to make this more acute for most of the affected people. Not just anti nuclear sentiment, but anti institutional, anti Soviet sentiment. That was entangled with Chernobyl, got absorbed into these nascent pro independence movements in Ukraine, but also in Belarus, in the Baltic states, you know, across the Soviet Union. So it really shook up the system. And even eventually Gorbachev himself would admit that Chernobyl was a major contributor to the Soviet collapse.
- [15:12]
Martin DeCaro
It was not his best moment, at least at the start. And we'll get to how eventually they did contain the Soviet authorities, did contain what was happening there. A Herculean effort. You wrote in your book Inheriting the Bomb. Chernobyl acquired a very special symbolism, as another scholar observed. In the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe, Ukrainian writers and journalists began talking in terms of a linguistic Chernobyl or a spiritual Chernobyl. When discussing the consequences of the 70 odd years of the Soviet experiment for the Ukrainian language and culture. Chernobyl served to mobilize large masses of people against the system. You go on to write about Oles Hunchar, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. 71 year old Ryder at the time was by far the most prominent living figure in Ukrainian literature. You say that he open, opened the congress. I guess this was a congress in 1989, the founding congress of the RUK, which was a pro independence party, right? Correct. He opened it with an eloquent address in which the message of support for Ukraine's national rebirth intermingled with a language of tolerance and inclusive humanistic values. He could not have failed to mention Chernobyl, quote, bureaucratic centralization, departmental arbitrariness, technical unpreparedness, dehumanization of science, dearth of free speech, the absence of real sovereignty of the republic. Are these not the explanations for Chernobyl? It's quite a profound statement by him. But when did you and your family finally realize the magnitude of what happened?
- [16:49]
Mariana Boodrin
Well, I can quite recall, right. I was still quite young and I think I was mostly preoccupied with other things in my life. But I think already as an early teen, you know, Chernobyl became a notion, as you say, it wasn't just a geographical location, it was an event. It was a concept that acquired meaning not only in humanitarian, as a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe. Right. We, we did hear, you know, as school children, later on in high school, of the Chernobyl children, kids who have suffered from radiation. A lot of them had thyroid cancer. Right? Because the radioactive iodine isotope gets absorbed into your thyroid. And especially in a growing developing child. We heard about liquidators. That was the name for workers of various kinds, construction workers, firefighters, people who got drawn from not Just from Ukraine, but from all parts of the Soviet Union to try and remediate or mitigate and remediate and clean up the location itself. Right. We heard about the exclusion zone, the 30 kilometer exclusion zone around the nuclear power plant where people were resettled from. So as a result, you know, you'd later learned already as a scholar of these things that some 200 towns and villages disappeared off the map in Ukraine alone because of the resettlements.
- [18:16]
Martin DeCaro
And those are still empty. I mean, there's nobody living there. Right? Animals and tourists. But people can't live there.
- [18:22]
Mariana Boodrin
Right. I actually got to go to Chernobyl for the first time last October. October 2025. I dare say it's a magical place. There's a bit of dark magic to it, but it's also very beautiful. Right. The nature has reclaim. But in the town of Chernobyl itself, there is an alley of lost towns. The names of towns up on posts with a red line across the name of the town or village. And these posts are sort of arranged on both sides along this alley. And you keep walking and there's these names and names and names of towns with a red slash across them. It's a moving and a terribly sad experience. They're not just towns, they're somebody's homes. Right. So about 400,000 people in Ukraine and Belarus and parts of Western Russia too were resettled as a result of Chernobyl.
- [19:16]
Martin DeCaro
You alluded to how an army of firefighters and specialists had to be sent there. They built a sarcophagus over one of the melted down reactors. I watched the HBO series Chernobyl a couple years ago. I thought it was pretty good.
- [19:31]
Narrator/Reporter
Comrade. Comrade.
- [19:34]
Martin DeCaro
Theatre.
- [19:35]
Narrator/Reporter
What just happened? I don't know. There's a fire in the turbine hall. The turbine hall? The control system tank. Hydrogen. You and tucked. Enough. You morons blew the tank. No, that's not. This is an emergency. Everyone stay calm. Our first priority exploded. We know. I came off what we're calling the reactor. Cor. We shut it down, but the control rods are still hurt. They're not all the way in. I disengaged the clutch. Disconnect the servos from the standby console. You two, get the backup pumps running. We need water.
- [20:07]
Martin DeCaro
I read an hour by hour chronology of what happened at Encyclopedia Britannica. You know, I understood some of it. I'm not a scientific person. The people who were there to run the reactors decided to do a test. Were they qualified to do this? You would hope they would be, but I don't know.
- [20:25]
Mariana Boodrin
Yeah. So one of the things that happened after the Chernobyl accident was the investigation by the Soviet government and the designers of the reactor, right. Like all the requisite institutions, they authored a report, and that report was presented, I think, in August 1986 at the IEA. And that report essentially placed the entire blame for the accident on operators error. It was a planned safety test. The reactor was going to go into shutdown. You know, reactors, they work for a certain period of time, but then they have to be shut down for planned maintenance. So this was a planned shutdown. And as part of the shutdown, there was going to be a test of the safety system. The point I want to make is that it was very quick and easy allocation of responsibility on those operators at unit four, the reactor number four at Chernobyl, who were, of course, not there to defend themselves because they died in the accident, in the explosion. So that kind of myth of operator error got embedded, you know, internationally, and it's still alive today. However, in seven years after the accident, the operators at Chernobyl nuclear power plant and other people, you know, physicists from the Kurchatov Institute and other scientists and engineers, once they finally got access to the documents from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that were whisked away to Moscow and were able to run some tests and reconstruct the events with all sorts of calculations of what might have happened. In that moment, it became very clear that it was the faulty reactor design with the kinds of characteristics that the operators did not know about, and that some of these faulty design features have led to accidents before Chernobyl, at a different nuclear power plant in Leningrad that operated the same kinds of reactors, RBMK reactors, and that that accident has been hushed down, not just internationally, but internally. So it was not communicated to operators who work on the same type of a reactor.
- [22:43]
Martin DeCaro
So they're building nuclear reactors but didn't know how to build them safely.
- [22:47]
Mariana Boodrin
Essentially, there was a Soviet program in the early 60s. There was a need for energy, right? For industrial growth, including for catching up with the United States and all sorts of areas, including arms racing and all of that. You need steel milling and you needed all these other things that were energy consuming. And so there was this push to build a bunch of nuclear reactors. Very, very quickly. Designers went in and made these reactor designs. They did not test them properly and just handed it to the builders and construction companies and. And it was literally tested already as an operating nuclear reactor. Right. There were no preparatory testing, as it were, or prototype testing, as it were. It was just all deployed right away. And that was, again, a characteristic of the kind of system that produced these. So in the end, it could not be really pinned on operator negligence or error or incompetence, because it is true that these people were really highly trained and they knew a lot about, you know, how to operate nuclear reactors. And. And it's a very strictly sort of regimented kind of job to operate a nuclear reactor. You have all these instructions and you follow them to a tee. In fact, it was established that the operators followed the instructions. It's just that the instructions did not include or didn't account for these design flaws in the reactor.
- [24:18]
Martin DeCaro
So this is also happening at a time when there's enormous debate, and that debate continues today about the safety of nuclear energy, danger of nuclear weapons. So it was important for the world to know what actually went wrong there. That truth eventually came out. What else has come out about Chernobyl that matters now?
- [24:39]
Mariana Boodrin
Well, it was a very critical event for the global governance of nuclear energy. Right. So very quickly after the accident, already in the summer of 1986, there are two international conventions that were very quickly drafted and adopted at the iea. On the one was on the notification of nuclear accidents, right? So saying you can't hide a nuclear accident, you really need to let the international community know.
- [25:07]
Martin DeCaro
One of the first Soviet TV reports about what happened at Chernobyl also included a factoid about Three Mile island in the United States. Those capitalist Yankees make mistakes, too, but go ahead.
- [25:19]
Mariana Boodrin
Yeah, there's never a communication without a whataboutism from Moscow then and now. The second convention was on the mutual assistance, right. To say that everyone would come together and assist. And then just a few Years later, in 1994, there's a big convention at the IEA that was adopted on nuclear safety and something that we now call safety culture. Every operator, everyone at the plant, from the director down to, you know, the welder is responsible. Right. Is a contributor to the safe operation of a nuclear power plant. Reactors got checked and double checked and tested for all these safe safety systems. Additional safety systems were implemented. This particular reactor, because of its design flaws, was deemed unsafe. So there really weren't any more reactors like that built after Chernobyl. Even though Russia still today continues to operate some of these reactors. They're only in Russia. There was one that was built in Lithuania. At the time when Lithuania was joining the European Union, that reactor was decommissioned. But also some of the countries began looking with much suspicion and nuclear energy in general, Right. And to say, okay, Even if we improve all this safety, is this way of generating electricity inherently safe? And do we want to build nuclear power plants or continue operating them? And Germany actually became more suspicious of a nuclear power plant. It operated a number on its territory. But it wasn't until the Fukushima disaster happened 15 years ago last March, that Germany decided to decommission all of its nuclear power plants. Right. So there was a dampening. And even when you. You look at the buildup of nuclear reactors in the world, the peak is really in mid-70s, and then there's a very significant drop in the 80s and 90s, or in late 80s and 90s. And that too is the effect of Chernobyl.
- [27:27]
Martin DeCaro
The Ukrainian government in 1995 said 125,000 people had died from the effects of Chernobyl radiation. Then in 2005, a decade later, the UN Chernobyl Forum estimated that up to 9,000 people could eventually die from excess cancer deaths linked to radiation exposure from Chernobyl. I mean, has there been one authoritative figure on the number of people who have died as a result of all the consequences of the meltdown?
- [27:58]
Mariana Boodrin
There actually hasn't been. Another figure that I heard was an analysis of a very prominent scientist and physicist, Richard Garwin. He estimated about 20,000. So that's somewhere in the middle, between 9 and 125. Certainly the initial figure, I think, at the IEA was even lower than 9, was something like 4,000. And that was later reviewed, revised up. Another part of the challenge is that it's objectively very difficult to disentangle those casual casualties that could be attributed directly to the nuclear event, a radiological event at Chernobyl, and to the general distress of a country that would then go through a very painful transition. Right. So union collapsed in 1991. There was a big demographic drop. There was lots of stress and strife and certainly illnesses that were connected to that. One thing that is often overlooked is the pandemic of abortion that spread not just across the Soviet Union, but also in Eastern Europe and Germany. So all these unborn babies that were aborted because their parents were afraid that they would have been affected by radiation would be born with birth defects. Right. Are those two.
- [29:24]
Martin DeCaro
So they weren't sure if there were birth defects. They did it out of fear of potential birth defects.
- [29:31]
Mariana Boodrin
They had the fear of potential birth defects. My understanding is that there wasn't, you know, wasn't something that was confirmed. People didn't want to risk it. So these are very difficult, ethical and otherwise things to think about.
- [29:46]
Martin DeCaro
Now, radiation is Horrendous. Everything I've read about it in the study of war, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. It's frightening, which explains why people are so hesitant.
- [29:56]
Mariana Boodrin
It's this invisible enemy, right? So you can't smell it, you can't touch it. You don't know, you know, cumulative. You don't know how much exposure you have unless you have the dosimeter or some equipment with you that could tell you that it's a very frightening enemy to face because you don't know what you're facing.
- [30:14]
Narrator/Reporter
It's now clear that the Soviet Union has suffered one of the worst disasters in the history of nuclear power. Massive quantities of radiation have apparently been released in an accident at the Chernobyl power station in the Ukraine. Many thousands of people live in the vicinity. Moscow admits there have been casualties and signs are that a big relief operation is underway. In an unprecedented step. The Kremlin acknowledged there'd been an accident, but only after Scandinavian scientists had picked up high radiation levels. A statement from the Soviet Council of Ministers was read on television, a sign of the degree of Moscow's concern.
- [30:50]
Martin DeCaro
The conversation continues. Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads.
- [31:09]
Commercial Narrator
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- [31:36]
Narrator/Reporter
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- [31:39]
Martin DeCaro
So how did Chernobyl affect the debate, the one that we discussed when you were on the podcast for the first time three years ago? How did Chernobyl influence the debate in Ukraine about ceding the nuclear weapons that were left on its territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union Union.
- [31:55]
Mariana Boodrin
It had a major impact. So you quoted from Olez Hunchar, his attitude towards things nuclear that were something that was intrinsically associated with the dysfunctional system, with the repression that Ukraine experienced as part of the Soviet Union. And so when Ukraine approached the threshold of its independent statehood, it was rather pushing towards more autonomy from Moscow. These national democrats, including this party of Vruh, which Ole Zonchar was part of the new Ukrainian parliament in the summer of 1990. So that still is a Full year and a half before the collapse, the formal collapse of the Soviet Union passed this Declaration of State sovereignty. And then many of the constitutive Soviet republics at the time were passing those essentially saying that their laws are supreme doesn't mean that they are leaving the Soviet Union, but kind of reserving the right to do so. And their laws on their territory are supreme, they're sovereign within the Soviet Union. And then, and in that declaration of sovereignty, the Ukrainian parliamentarians, absolutely unilaterally, so that was without any pressure from the outside, from the United States or Russia that would come later, essentially recorded their desire, the desire for Ukraine to become eventually neutral and nuclear free. That first and foremost dealt with the nuclear weapons. Weapons deployed on the territory of Ukraine. There were a lot. World's third largest nuclear arsenal was then deployed in Ukraine. And so they wanted these terrible nuclear weapons again that were controlled by Moscow, that made Ukraine as it were, that tied Ukraine through these centralized command control structures to Moscow. They thought that until and unless they cut these chains holding Ukraine to Moscow, Ukraine could never be fully independent. But of course this anti nuclear sentiment general, played into the nuclear renunciation recorded in the 1990 Declaration of Sovereignty. And that became the framework essentially for when the Soviet Union did collapse. That became the framework that Ukraine was essentially, I don't want to say constrained by, but guided, guided by deliberations in its deliberations of its nuclear choices. And Ukraine never formally reneged on it. It was just that it wanted a deal, right? It want to negotiate a fair deal for giving up these nuclear weapons that it was going to give away again willingly and voluntarily and unilaterally. But another thing that happened in 1990 is that shortly after passing the declaration of Sovereignty, the Ukrainian parliament also adopted a moratorium on all new nuclear construction. So that essentially meant that three nuclear reactors that were under construction then were mothballed. And that again is a reflection of the general attitude of the representatives of the Ukrainian people at the time towards not only nuclear weapons, but also nuclear energy, or rather first nuclear energy. And as a derivative and nuclear weapons in Ukraine's territory, that moratorium would then be lifted in 1995 and these reactors would be finished and put online later on. But this issue of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons is somehow very interwoven in the Ukrainian history and it's still, still is today. Essentially basically at the time there was
- [35:29]
Martin DeCaro
a non proliferation imperative, there was more international comity. In the early 1990s when Russia was seeking better relations with the United States under Boris Yeltsin, so the idea of not pursuing nuclear weapons, well, as you say, I mean this was, this was an international, I don't want to call it a vibe, but you know what
- [35:50]
Mariana Boodrin
I mean, it was, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. I call it zeitgeist. Right. So kind of the spirit of the time was decidedly anti proliferation, anti nuclear. In fact, even the two superpowers were reducing, radically reducing the number of nuclear weapons. Now in 1991, South Africa that had an indigenous nuclear program, dismantled it and joined the treaty on the non proliferation nuclear weapons. The Cold War was over and there was this hope and this sentiment that would cooperate and integrate Russia into European security structures. And to stake your security on nuclear weapons and on nuclear deterrence seemed really quite old fashioned and outmoded.
- [36:37]
Martin DeCaro
The United States and Russia were disarming at their height. The Soviet Union, the height of its arsenal was something like 40 to 45,000 nuclear warheads. Russia has about 6,500 or so today. Same for the United States. That's still more than enough to blow up the earth many times over. But just think of of that 40,000 to around 6,000.
- [36:58]
Narrator/Reporter
Unlike treaties in the past, it didn't simply codify the status quo or a news arms buildup. It didn't simply talk of controlling an arms race. For the first time in history, the language of arms control was replaced by arms reduction.
- [37:14]
Martin DeCaro
Well, we're going in the opposite direction now, which sets up my next question. Many experts say there's already a nuclear arms reduction race underway. China is expanding its arsenal. All the Cold war era arms control and disarmament treaties have expired or been abrogated. Do Ukrainians today, talking about political leaders or even just ordinary citizens regret not having nukes? And are you worried, Marianna, given everything that's happened in recent years, that more countries might see nuclear weapons as the key to deterrence to avoid being attacked?
- [37:49]
Mariana Boodrin
It is certainly true that nuclear weapons play a lot more, a lot more of a salient role in international politics today than they did when Ukraine made its decision to disarm. Right. That side guist is over. It's reversed. As you said, China is building up. France will be adding more nuclear weapons to its arsenal. Britain to the United States. We haven't heard yet. It has a potential to quickly UP upload its ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles from 1 to 4. That that decision hasn't been made, but it could be. And you know, certainly Russia has a lot of non deployed weapons that it could quickly pull out from storage facilities and redeploy so there's a lot of potential for a nuclear arms race in a big way. And as you said, it's already afoot because of China primarily.
- [38:45]
Martin DeCaro
I guess the big concern is countries that don't have nukes now going to for it. South Korea, Japan. I'm not saying they will, but there's talk. Poland has talked about it. Right.
- [38:54]
Mariana Boodrin
And, you know, you asked about Ukraine, whether there is regret. There is a lot of regret. There's a lot of regret and a lot of revisionist history about what had happened. There's a lot of bitterness. And part of it is because when the commitments made to Ukraine, the security commitments under the Budapest Memorandum, which was part of the deal negotiated by Ukraine in 1994, you know, as part of this kind of disarmament settlement and package, Budapest Memorandum and security commitments under it were violated by Russia, one of the signatories, but sort of other signatories, the United States and the United Kingdom, didn't exactly react in the way that would demonstrate to the world that, you know, these commitments made to a country in exchange for its nuclear disarmament were really that important.
- [39:44]
Martin DeCaro
It wasn't a defensive treaty. It was just assurances written on a piece of paper.
- [39:48]
Mariana Boodrin
Paper, indeed. Yes, so there was that original sin. But also, you know, international commitments are inherently difficult to enforce, even if they're legal, even if you put all the right words on the paper, it is still a piece of paper without any high authority to enforce it. So it's really up to the States how much stock they put into their commitments, political, legal or otherwise.
- [40:15]
Martin DeCaro
Well, how many European countries have sent their own troops to Ukraine to help it fight Russia? Zero.
- [40:20]
Mariana Boodrin
Well, none. And why? Because Russia is a nuclear country. It's a nuclear power, and it's using its nuclear status and its nuclear threats to deter others from helping Ukraine. And it has partially worked. Right, Even in the. Not just in putting boots on the ground, but even in the provision of military aid initially, remember before, we're now in a different reality with Ukraine getting a lead with drones and kind of revolutionizing the battlefield that way. But initially, Ukraine was begging for as much as, you know, stingers, and even those were slow in coming. It was begging for tanks, it was begging for armored vehicles. It was begging, you know, the first two years or so of the war was all about Ukraine begging for military assistance. And every single system was considered very carefully for its escalatory potential. Why? Because Russia is a nuclear power and it could escalate to the nuclear threshold. And, you know, nobody wanted that, So
- [41:24]
Martin DeCaro
I guess my point was about credibility. The Budapest memorandum lacked credibility. Ukraine's not part of NATO, is a long way of saying that Russia understands that the United States and Europe are not going to send their own soldiers into Ukraine, fight and die for Ukraine. It's a credibility issue.
- [41:41]
Mariana Boodrin
It's very evident that nuclear weapons play a major role. Current nuclear possession plays a major role in these decisions. And so for the outside world, for those who might harbor nuclear ambitions, the optics of the Ukraine case is really unfortunate. Right. So there you had a country that had a nuclear option. Right. And again, there's, there's a lot of buts I don't want. You know, there's a whole book written on it I'm not going to go into. I'm not saying Ukraine had the world's third largest nuclear arsenal that it could use in that moment, but it certainly had an option to develop its inheritance, inheritance into nuclear deterrent. I mean, technologically and otherwise. It chose not to. And then fast forward 20 years, the settlement that left Ukraine in a security vacuum became an invitation for an aggressor. And then because the other signatories did so little in 2014, that became a permissive factor for 2022 when Russia dared to stage a full scale invasion. Bank thinking based on its past experience. Right. It was not crazy, it was not irrational that other states will not react. The other signatories of the Budapest memorandum will take a circumspect view of, of their commitments under that document. The value of nuclear weapons has risen in this world and then the international security environment has deteriorated. And so it is the risk, quite a risk, that the states that find themselves in this kind of similar security predicament as Ukraine might look to nuclear weapons.
- [43:22]
Narrator/Reporter
Thanks to your vision and that of Ukrainian parliament, you are removing the threat of nuclear weapons and laying the groundwork for an era of peace with your neighbors. I salute the courage you have shown. America will stand with you to support your independence, your territorial integrity and, and your reforms. We are bound together by a dedication to peace and a devotion to freedom. The flame of that commitment to freedom was kept burning during the Cold War by nearly a million Ukrainian Americans, some of whom are with us here today, who never forgot Ukraine, and who are today contributing to its reawakening.
- [44:01]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of history. As it happens, the United States finds itself stuck in a war against Iran. A stalemate over the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump has repeatedly threatened Iran only to back down. His madman act is not working. We're going to revisit Richard Nixon's madman Diplomacy during Vietnam with the great historian Carolyn Eisenberg. That is next as we report History as it happens. The painful lessons, they're never learned. Which is why we keep doing podcasts. Make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History as it happens. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to libsynads.com that's L I B S yeah. Today
- [45:29]
Mariana Boodrin
Want to be a star? No problem. Anyone can shine on TikTok. Post your first video today. Real life, real story. Real you. Download TikTok and get started.