HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on the Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Mariana Budjeryn.

She's senior research associate at the Harvard Kennedy School's, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and author of the critically important book, Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine.

Mariana, a pleasure to be with you today.

BUDJERYN: Thank you so much for inviting me, Alexander.

HEFFNER: You're welcome.

Let me ask you to begin, what is the status of unaccounted for nuclear material in the former Soviet Union geography?

BUDJERYN: Well, fortunately it seems that there hasn't been an unaccountable for nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, certainly not as a result of mismanaging the nuclear collapse of the Soviet Union.

There were great concerns that that might be just the case as the Soviet Union was falling apart, and authorities that used to oversee the security of these materials, both weapons and civilian nuclear fuel, um, that that might end up in the wrong hands if maybe some people would recall.

There was the scare of loose nukes.

So fears that either military commanders or some crooked officials would go on and start selling nuclear weapons to potential proliferators around the world.

And the Middle East was a specific concern at that point, as to point out, it remains today.

But fortunately through a combination of some luck of the high morale of the people who were the guardians of these materials in the former Soviet Union and also through some very smart policies that the United States quickly put in place, including the provision of technical assistance to secure some of these materials and facilities where they were stored it seems that the worst has been averted.

So, as far as we know, we know where all of the materials are.

All of the warheads have been transferred out of the non-Russian successor states of the USSR, so that would've been Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and ended up in Russia only.

And the civilian nuclear materials for the power plants, specifically in Ukraine, have been sufficiently secured as well.

HEFFNER: During this Ukraine-Russia, Russia-Ukraine war, there have been moments, when there were artillery attacks on facilities that have nuclear capabilities, whether that's nuclear energy capability or nuclear militaristic intention.

What have we learned as a result of these last few years about the vulnerability, especially of the power plants, but the potential for the dissemination of nuclear or chemical material as a function of non-nuclear combat?

BUDJERYN: Right.

Well, let me start by saying that Ukraine actually doesn't have any military nuclear facilities.

Ukraine is a non-nuclear weapon state.

It gave up all of its warheads that it had inherited from the former Soviet Union.

And later on in, in the 2000s, it also transferred about 250 kilos of highly enriched uranium, which is weapons grade material that was left in Ukraine for research purposes at the research reactor in Kiev that was transferred out of Ukraine's territory as well.

So, these are sort of the dangerous kind of proliferation type of materials that we watch out for.

So, what is left in Ukraine is a very substantial civilian nuclear energy sector, with four power plants, one of which unfortunately is now under Russian control.

There's a Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant that has been occupied very early in the war.

These facilities also have, you know, in particular as a [inaudible] nuclear power plant has spent fuel storage facilities both kind of close to the reactors, but also separate dry storage facilities.

So this is older nuclear fuel that has been repackaged and is stored in plain air.

It's stored under the open skies and that these facilities have been gravely affected by the war.

And we hear a lot about as Zaporizhzhia, the ZNPP, if I could shorten it to that, that has been occupied, that has the operators found themselves trying to manage these reactors and this very radioactive, tons of radioactive materials under very unsafe and unsecure, insecure circumstances where a military force is firing at and taking over their facility.

And we have to be very grateful to these people for handling their tasks with so much professionalism to avert the worst.

But what we are learning right now is that we've been thinking about nuclear security of civilian nuclear facilities as sort of these nuclear materials, right?

Whether they're in the core of the reactor or next to the reactor and spent fuel pools or elsewhere, and we need to secure them from nefarious actors, when the entire power plant is under threat is under shelling or military armed men walk into these facilities.

There's a whole new range of threats that appear.

These are very highly regimented facilities.

You have to really follow the safety protocols for all of these processes to make sure everything is done just right to avert accidents, and people who are working under such psychological and physical duress cannot be expected to actually follow these protocols to be prepared to mitigate some of the adverse consequences of this.

So these problems and challenges really compound exponentially.

So it's not just making sure that you know, that the uranium, low and rich uranium fuel doesn't get in the wrong, hence, it's really making sure that there's powered water supply that's uninterrupted to the power plant.

And we know from Ukrainian case that, that these water lines and special power lines have come under shelling and have been disrupted, and that our plan went into total blackout eight times.

That's unprecedented.

It worked very, very bad for nuclear security.

The reservoir, which was providing water for the safe operation and the cooling of the reactors, the Kakhovka reservoir that was destroyed by the Russians and the War.

So now there's no safe way to restart that plant.

And most importantly, I cannot stress this enough is the fate of the people who work there.

I have talked to some of the evacuated folks and operators from Zaporizhzhia.

Many of them have been detained and tortured, and their families have been put at risk.

And this is in no way a responsible nuclear power to behave in terms of handling civilian nuclear facilities even during the conflict.

HEFFNER: I imagine you're feeling is that until the conflict is resolved, until the war ends, that the possibility of drawing up a framework to address what you just described, the pressures under which Ukrainian and Russian facilities are under as this continues to carry forward.

Is that the case that until there is an end to combat, it would be challenging to envision any kind of establishment of new rules in involving how not to stress nuclear facilities?

BUDJERYN: Well, now that you mentioned that there are international rules and norms that regulate the use of military force in armed conflict with regard to nuclear facilities.

And that is to say that the use or threat of use of military force against nuclear facilities is forbidden under the Geneva Convention, protocol, additional protocol one, I think, that was added in the seventies.

I think it's 1977 if memory serves.

Uh, so there's a specific prohibition to endanger, these kind of engineering works and facilities that might "release dangerous forces.” And that includes dikes and dams and nuclear power generating facilities with kind of the understanding that there's radiational risks and nuclear risks that, that are attendant with the threat to these facilities.

And Russia has clearly very blatantly disregarded these rules.

So it's really not a matter of, I mean, I think we could think of the ways to bolster them to make these norms more robust, to specify exactly what and how it is forbidden.

But the bigger problem is then enforcement of these rules enforce and these laws in the international relations, because it becomes very blatantly clear that if one of the major stakeholders in the international system, a country like Russia, that is a founding member of the UN founding member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, that is tasked with managing peaceful applications of nuclear materials, and nuclear energy, safely and securely, I mean, Russia's part and parcel of setting up this system, of making these rules herself.

And then it turns around and it violates them.

And what recourse do states really have to bring it back into compliance when Russia is also a veto carrying member of the UN Security Council?

The only basically decision-making body in the international system that has any kind of bite, if I could put it that way.

And so the Security Council is gridlock, and it's really down to the way states negotiate, including by means of arms, the way to either liberate and secure or avoid risks to nuclear facilities that endanger creating a major disaster.

HEFFNER: So with the attempt, the failure of the quasi coup and with the death of Navalny, am I correct in the idea that Putin is going to lead Russia as long as he's living and as long as he wants to?

BUDJERYN: Well, for one, we don't really, know.

Right?

The future is rather unpredictable.

Anything could happen.

I think from the standpoint of Western powers and from the standpoint of Ukraine, I think we need to realize that we have limited tools of leverage and limited power to affect outcomes inside Russia.

It is really for the Russian people to decide what kind of state they want to live in and what kind of leaders they want to be ruled by.

The Prigozhin incident to which you referred, I think I most liked the word mutiny to describe that was squashed.

And, you know, Prigozhin was very quickly dealt with, which was absolutely not surprising in a system like Russia.

It also revealed just how little space for contestation there is in the Russian political system.

You mentioned Navalnys death.

It is true that he has been an oppositional figure, but there is no such thing as Russian political opposition.

There hasn't been now for a very long time.

It's a very airtight political system in which there really isn't any kind of public discourse about what constitutes public good and how we are best to provide it.

That is usually characteristic of, I'm not even using the word democracy here, but there could be different ways in which this kind of public good is decided in a political system.

But there really isn't anything like that in Russia.

It is Mr. Putin and his very close circle that makes these decisions.

And he is sort of the manager of a very complicated system.

I think one thing that I would urge us to keep in mind is the fact that Putin might remain in power, likely for a very long time, doesn't really spell the stability of the Russian system long term.

One thing is that because it's such a personalistic autocracy, it's been really built up by Putin himself and arranging this kind of networks and oligarchs and the money that in economic interest within the country, he really deftly manages it.

The moment he goes, there's no succession rule book, there's nothing.

I mean, elections matter for nothing.

There's many people will be jostling for power.

So that will be a very scary moment for Russia, something that might risk a lot of instability inside Russia.

But also, you know, Putin is getting older people deteriorate.

We know that very well in this country too, right?

So the ability, the kind of this deafness with which you can make decisions and keep on, you know, kind of puppeteering the system that also is going to deteriorate and, you know, he'll have to be responding to very significant pressures that are only going to accumulate on Russia.

We look at Ukraine and how it's kind of weaker in terms of conventional military.

It's more reliant on the West and has smaller manpower to put up in the fight with Russia.

But it doesn't mean that Russia is doing particularly great.

The sanctions do take time to take effect, but they do make a difference.

Over the years, there's great labor shortages in Russia because people have left and many people have died at the front.

There are big problems that he will have to manage that he basically created for Russia himself by unleashing this war.

So this present day Russia is not forever.

HEFFNER: Do we know how many crises there are that we don't see when it comes to nuclear issues?

Is that something that's actually publicized or known?

But it just takes a little digging to find out.

BUDJERYN: It does take digging to find out some of the things pop up, eventually, but no, we don't have the full picture and know the full extent of all the sort of near misses and close calls and accidents and false alarms.

We do know quite a bit now after the Cold War is over, and some of the older documents have been declassified.

And we know that nobody's immune to these false alarms and incidents, not just the Soviet Union, and now Russia, also in the United States, there have been a lot of mishaps.

Anything that's manmade is prone to, at some point, malfunction or misfire and people involved.

They make mistakes or wrenches dropped into a missile silo.

And then Titan III multi megaton warhead goes, flying out and doesn't detonate lucky for us, or a couple of cruise missiles or whatever bombs drop from a strategic bomber and fall again don't detonate.

There have been plenty of cases like that.

And what we know is that during an actual crisis, something like a Cuban Missile Crisis, or 1983 was a very, very tense year in Europe, where there's more room for misperception and there's more room for mistakes, and there's more room for a minor incident, the kind of snowballing into something bigger through and misinterpretation escalate dangers and so forth.

So we do have to be very mindful, that nuclear weapons are still with us.

They haven't gone away.

In fact, there's more nuclear possessors now in the world than there were during the Cold War.

There's nine countries that possess nuclear weapons and some of them have far less experience with managing their stockpile than the United States or Russia for that matter.

I mean there's been decades of experience and learning.

And so I think it is a very good development that there's some increased public awareness now of the nuclear issue.

And that is happening actually through pop culture.

So we had a movie like Oppenheimer come out by Christopher Nolan.

There's a book by Annie Jacobson that's been very popular, I hear will also be made into a movie.

And I think this kind of broader public engagement with the nuclear issue is going to be very important because after the end of the Cold War, it became a very niche issue.

And a lot of people forgot that nuclear weapons are still very much with us.

HEFFNER: What's the best-case scenario for the suspension of new buildup when it comes to individual countries?

If you want to answer it geographically or if you want to answer it holistically.

BUDJERYN: Well, here our options are unfortunately very limited.

Every major nuclear power is engaged in so-called modernization, and China especially is building up very aggressively.

It has a much smaller nuclear arsenal that either the United States or Russia, but is trying to catch up and it's investing a lot of money in this buildup.

So we might see for the first time in history instead of numbers of nuclear warheads going down, they're actually going up.

They have been going down since the early 80s, since the peak of the Cold War, the Cold War buildup where there were about 60,000 nuclear weapons in the world.

Those have been slashed through bilateral arms control.

So the United States and the Soviet Union later.

Russia wouldn't negotiate these arms control treaties, with the view to you know, they didn't want to be bankrupted by the arms race in then.

The Soviet Union, was nevertheless but to limit the arms race and to also create a more stable sort of environment, a strategic environment.

But at this point, neither the United States nor Russia are talking to each other over the conflict of Ukraine as a major impediment to their engagement, but also for other issues.

So it's really inconceivable to even think that they would sit down at the negotiating table and start talking how to reduce nuclear arms, not least because Russia is very actively using its nuclear status, and its nuclear arsenal in political means.

It hasn't detonated a bomb yet, but it's brandishing all sorts of nuclear threats.

And those seem to have at least some moderating effect on the way that the West is engaging with Ukraine.

Every new weapon system is getting very careful consideration for how escalating it might be.

None of the NATO countries that send their troops to Ukraine, all of that to a great degree is because of the fears of nuclear escalation.

So really nuclear weapons are proving their worth to Russia.

And one might wonder if Russia were not a nuclear power, how likely would it have been to invade in the first place?

If it couldn't hide behind that nuclear shield that it has?

So I think banking on the fact that Russia in this situation would be willing to reduce greatly number of nuclear weapons would be naive, but also the same would go for the United States now that it competes not only with what we call peer competitors, sort of a nuclear equal, that was the Soviet Union and then Russia, but also now looking to China.

So I think we would be lucky to not see a buildup in terms of numbers in the United States and in Russia.

If we could just keep those numbers at where they are, that would already be an achievement.

And, of course, you know, hopefully down the road when the wars are fought out and the international security environment shifts for the better, then we can resume work on reducing these numbers.

HEFFNER: You didn't accept the premise of my question, Mariana, but I understand why.

And in the two minutes we have remaining two hypothetical and speculative questions, admittedly.

The first is for there to be the kind of global consciousness on this issue, even with the cultural phenomenon you're mentioning, there would have to be, in my judgment, a blip in the radar.

BUDJERYN: Well, about the nuclear blip, uh, there is kind of this pedestrian wisdom that past crises have led to wake up calls were also wake up calls.

And after the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were all these other agreements, arms limitation agreements that were in place.

And that's because the leaders realized just how close they came to a disaster.

Very nuanced historical research does not really bear that out.

There's a lot of other things that would have to happen for the leaders to come together and start negotiating arms reductions and disarmament.

And we saw that the greatest reduction in the number of nuclear weapons really when the Cold War was winding down.

The very rationale for these weapons was dissipating.

So that was under the tenure of Soviet President Gorbachev, who wanted to reformulate relations with the United States.

And then early years through the nine 1990s under the new Russian leadership, especially Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin.

So I don't think there necessarily has to be a real kind of disaster, a blip or say nuclear use in Ukraine that would be a wake-up call or a testing by one of the nuclear powers.

That would certainly be a wake-up call.

But it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily have to happen for people to understand that nuclear weapons are capable to obliterate all life on earth except for cockroaches.

I'm told they will survive it.

But let me just add that I do worry about the risk and the likelihood of Russia's nuclear use in Ukraine because Ukraine is not protected by nuclear deterrence, neither of its own nor of the United States.

So, Russia might calculate that the consequences of this use might not be as dire as if it were to target a nuclear alliance like NATO.

In terms of prospects of peace in Ukraine.

I think, again, one of the popular misperceptions is to say, oh, all wars end in peace negotiations.

Yes, they do.

But a lot of times those peace negotiations are basically just recording the actual facts that have already been achieved on the ground by military and political means.

I think we haven't really seen the military option run out yet.

I think a lot will depend what will happen in November in this country.

HEFFNER: Mariana, thank you so much for your insight today.

BUDJERYN: Thank you so much for inviting me.

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