Ukrinform
February 20, 2015
Former NATO Secretary General on Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament: I was wrong
KYIV: The idea of nuclear disarmament has failed and led to a selective reduction of the nuclear arsenal in the world, and, as a result, Ukraine received guarantees that are not performed in exchange for unilateral disarmament.
Former Secretary General of NATO [1999-2004] and Secretary of State for Defence and Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland George Robertson expressed this opinion in his article for Herald Scotland, an Ukrinform correspondent reported.
“I started my own political career, as many people know, carrying a Ban the Bomb banner. By giving up the Bomb I believed that we would give a lead and start a benign chain reaction. I was wrong. As Defence Secretary of this country [Defense Minister of Britain from 1997 to 1999] I was responsible for the biggest ever reductions in our nuclear weapon capacity and it led to no copycut [copycat?] reductions elsewhere,” Robertson wrote.
He noted that the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 “when Ukraine, holding the world’s third largest nuclear weapons stockpile, agreed to give them up,” in return provided “solemn security assurances from Russia, the U.S. and the UK.”
Robertson claims it’s difficult to forecast how the situation in Crimea and Donbas would have been developing if Ukraine had possessed an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
“And it is legitimate to ask this; would Crimea have been grabbed and Eastern Ukraine occupied if the Ukrainians had kept some of their nukes?” reads the publication.
The author also warns that failure to comply with the commitments made in Budapest in 1994, the neglect of current policy of containment can lead to the fact that the world in the next 50 years will face new, “known and unknown” threats.
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