U.S. help is needed to dispose of the remaining solid-rocket engines used in Soviet-era intercontinental ballistic missles.
Ukraine promised during a nuclear security summit in Washington, D.C., on April 12-13 to get rid of its remaining small stockpile of highly enriched uranium and asked U.S. officials for help in destroying toxic rocket engines left over from Soviet times.
Ukraine’s pledge and images of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and U.S. President Barack Obama smiling during their first meeting surprised many Ukrainians, since these issues had not gotten much publicity before the American summit attended by leaders of 47 nations.
But these events were expected by nuclear proliferation experts. Volodymyr Saprykin, director of energy programs for the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center for Political and Economic Studies, said that officials from both countries have spent more than a decade talking about Ukraine’s highly enriched uranium stockpile.
“Ukraine’s recent gesture is the logical outcome of years of work [to limit] the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” Saprykin said, noting that Ukraine participated in the U.S.-Nuclear Threat Initiative launched in 2001 and the Global Threat Reduction Initiative launched in 2004.
Yanukovych said Ukraine, left with the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, will transfer nearly 90 kilograms (200 pounds) of the fissile material to Russia for processing by 2012.
“By the end of this year, the lion’s share of Ukraine’s highly enriched uranium will be transported to Russia,” Yanukovych said in an interview with CNN on April 13. “Nuclear waste from the spent uranium will be returned to a new storage facility near Chornobyl.”
The White House welcomed the decision after an April 12 meeting between Yanukovych and Obama, who reconfirmed security assurances given to Ukraine by the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom in 1994 for becoming a non-nuclear weapon state.
In other signs of progress, China’s President Hu Jintao agreed to step up pressure on Iran over its atomic plans and participate in talks on sanctions against Iran. A week earlier in Prague, Obama signed a treaty with Russia to reduce the number of nuclear warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based ballistic missiles and bombers.
These were part of a U.S.-led drive with global leaders to secure all nuclear materials within four years.
Canada, Chile, and Mexico also pledged to give up some or all of their stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, while Argentina and Pakistan promised to strengthen port security and prevent nuclear smuggling. Ukraine and Chile agreed to hand over uranium that could be enriched to weapons level, while Russia announced plans to spend $2.5 billion to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium as part of a separate agreement with Washington.
Although the exact amounts are kept secret, Ukraine reportedly keeps about 68 kilograms of highly enriched uranium at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology; roughly 13 kilograms at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv; and about 6 kilograms at the Sevastopol Naval Research Institute.
Yanukovych told CNN that all Ukraine’s highly enriched uranium is stored and monitored in strict compliance with standards established by the International Atomic Energy Agency. He stressed during the interview that U.S. help is needed to dispose of remaining solid-rocket engines used in Soviet-era intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“The remaining rocket engines pose an environmental threat,” Yanukovych said. “Ukraine should not be left alone to solve this problem.”
Fuel and Energy Minister Yuriy Boiko, who accompanied Yanukovych at the summit, said a new nuclear research facility would be built in Kharkiv and the country would receive cutting-edge technology as a result of the deal. “We will also save a lot of money,” Boiko was quoted by Interfax-Ukraine as saying on April 13. “Our partners will pick up the costs for transporting and reprocessing nuclear fuel. They will provide full delivery of new low-grade nuclear fuel.”
“Securing the Bomb 2010,” a 132-page report published on the eve of the summit by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said numerous studies by the U.S. and other governments have concluded that it is plausible that a sophisticated terrorist group could make a crude nuclear bomb, also known as an “improvised nuclear device” if it received enough nuclear materials. For this they would need either a quantity of plutonium or 25-50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, roughly the size of one or two grapefruits.
Yanukovych’s counterpart in Minsk, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, told reporters in Homel Oblast on April 14 that he was not invited to attend the summit because he had refused to turn over his country’s 200 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.
“They drove me to the brink and put a knife at my throat: ‘Give it away!’ I said: I had already given away nuclear weapons, and how did we benefit? No one has the right to dictate. Let us sit down at a negotiating table and decide how to deal with this large amount of enriched uranium,” Lukashenko was quoted by Interfax-Ukraine as saying. “We are not a banana republic and we can keep this nuclear material as we have been doing for 20 years now.”
Unlike Belarus, Ukraine has been an international leader in disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation and a valued partner in implementation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty since 1994, when it began destroying all of the country’s intercontinental ballistic missile silos, and some 5000 nuclear munitions, including 2000 strategic-range munitions, long-range cruise missiles and strategic bombers remaining on its territory.
Since the mid-1990s, Ukraine has also participated in the U.S.-funded Cooperative Threat Reduction Program through which the U.S. departments of defense, energy and state provide equipment, services and technical advice to assist Ukraine in preventing proliferation and in securing and dismantling weapons of mass destruction, related materials and production facilities inherited from the former Soviet Union.
Kyiv Post staff writer Peter Byrne can be reached at [email protected].
