The Budapest Memorandum 1994 After 30 Years:
Non-Proliferation Success Overshadowed by NATO Blowup Then, Russian War on Ukraine Now |
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Washington, D.C., December 5, 2024 – Thirty years ago, the Budapest Memorandum ensured the destruction of dangerous post-Soviet nuclear stockpiles but was overshadowed at the time by Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s complaint that NATO expansion was causing a new division of Europe, according to declassified U.S. documents published on the anniversary today by the National Security Archive. Yeltsin’s “cold peace” blowup at Bill Clinton in Budapest in December 1994 represented the biggest train wreck on the track to NATO expansion in the 1990s and resulted from “combustible” domestic politics in both the U.S. and Russia, together with contradictions in the Clinton attempt to have his cake and eat it too—expanding NATO and partnering with Russia at the same time, according to the documents. The blowup occurred simultaneously with one of the most significant achievements of U.S.-Russian-Ukrainian cooperative threat reduction: the signing of the Budapest Memorandum with Ukraine on disposing the deteriorating Soviet arsenal of nuclear weapons based in Ukraine. The documents show that Ukraine bargained hard for a trade very much in its own national interest, where the 1000+ nuclear warheads left in Ukraine, each a mini-Chernobyl in the making, would be re-processed in Russia for fuel rods that provided electricity in Ukraine for the next decade, in a sequence lubricated with funding from the American Nunn-Lugar program. These documents, the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the National Security Archive, include a series of revelatory memos from Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott to Clinton and to Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the secret memcon of the presidents’ one-on-one at the Washington summit in September 1994. Clinton kept assuring Yeltsin that any NATO enlargement would be slow, with no surprises, building a Europe that was inclusive, not exclusive, and in “partnership” with Russia. The full corpus of thousands of pages covering the entire 1990s appeared this year in the award-winning series published by ProQuest, the Digital National Security Archive, which won Choice magazine’s designation as an “Outstanding Academic Title 2018.” Curated by Archive senior analyst Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya, US-Russia Relations from the Collapse of the Soviet Union to the Rise of Putin includes more than 2,500 documents and more than 13,000 pages of the highest-level declassified evidence. |
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