The general still mourns his long-lost nukes. Flooding from leaking pipes has made the walls and ceilings damp in the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces Veterans Office in Kyiv, causing pictures of his missile arsenal to bubble and bend.
He walked through rooms of faded nuclear glory with sad nostalgia, touching pieces of “Satan” intercontinental ballistic missile engines; tritium boosters and fragments of SS-24 “Scalpel” rocket launch systems on tabletops, all that is left of Ukraine’s nuclear missile stockpile, once the third largest in the world, as workmen began to box them, taking them away into storage in preparation to close the office for good.
“I knew deep in my soul that we should never have given them away,” he said, caressing vestiges of machinery that could have destroyed America many times over, then turning to point at obsolete maps of Ukraine scattered with red flags marking nuclear missile silos. “If we still had our nuclear weapons now, we would have our respect and security, and be free of Russian aggression.”
Major General Mykola Filatov, formerly commander of the 46th Missile Division, is not alone in his sorrow.
As Ukraine braces itself against building Russian military pressure and potential invasion, the loss of the country’s nuclear arsenal is rued across the nation, and further afield too.
Having handed over or destroyed its missiles as part of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by the UK, US, and Russia — a deal supposed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity and safety from attack — the country’s nuclear disarmament was once heralded as the beacon of hope for future reductions of stockpiles across the world.
Today, with more than 130,000 Russian troops gathered along Ukraine’s borders, bereft of deterrent and facing possible invasion from a nuclear power, that hope is dead.
“The lesson of Budapest is clear to us all,” said General Filatov, 72, who until the memorandum was signed controlled 86 missile silos and more than 700 of the 1,700 nuclear warheads that remained in Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union. “Don’t disarm!”
The Budapest memorandum is now referred to by all sides in the gathering conflict. Signed in Hungary on December 5, 1994, the signatories guaranteed that in return for Ukraine removing its nuclear weapons, Ukraine’s security would be safeguarded from either nuclear attack or territorial violation.
Yet the deal, described as a “weak tea” accord by diplomats, contained no enforcement measures and never became a recognised international treaty backed by western military commitment.
At General Filatov’s former headquarters in the underground nuclear command silo at Pobuzke in central Ukraine, the last remaining facility in the country, Ukrainian veterans under Filatov’s command still safeguarding the site reflected on their nuclear heyday with cold recall, and shared their own regrets over Kyiv’s decision to hand over its nuclear arsenal.
“Ukraine would still have Crimea and the Donbas if we had held on to our rockets,” said a former colonel and launch operator of the 46th Missile Division, known only by his first name Gennady, who had spent a total of six years underground in silos. “Our rockets were our power. Our rockets were our protection. Budapest has left us weak.”
As part of his duties Gennady, now 60, had been one of six personnel working on the final two floors of the 12-floor command silo in the bowels of the earth. Strapped in seats at the nuclear button consul 45m below ground, two men had dual control of the nuclear launch, each entering attack codes then pressing a button in the event of orders to launch.
A third man sat at a communications desk in the 3m-wide room, while in the floor beneath them three others slept in a tiny space between alternating shifts. The button operators’ chairs had ashtrays fixed in the arms so that they could smoke while turning the world to dust, while a specialised CO2 converter maintained survivable oxygen levels.
Gennady said: “We tried not to think about the day we would press the button, or of our families above ground but we were specially trained and for sure we would have launched if ordered.”
Data excludes decommissioned warheads awaiting dismantlement
*Other includes China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and the UK
Situated in the bleak windswept wilderness of the steppes, part of the silo site is now a museum, though access is still prohibited to the first ten floors. Circled by defunct minefields, guard towers and rusting nets of electric fencing, beside one of General Filatov’s partially filled rocket silos sat a “dead-man’s-hand” sensor shaped like a mushroom. Designed to read radiation, if Gennady and his team had died before initiating launch, the sensor would automatically launch an attack of its own, so that nuclear war could continue even if all its participants were already dead.
A huge antenna on the surface above the silo was deliberately angled northward so that in the event of nuclear war any surviving launch teams, emerging from the silo after a stipulated 45 days, maddened and disorientated in a sunless ash-covered world where compasses no longer worked, could tell which way around the dead planet faced.
Applauded in its time as a historic check against such visions of nuclear Armageddon, the violation of the Budapest Memorandum has caused alarm among nuclear experts across the world, who fear the Ukraine crisis may now destabilise non-proliferation efforts elsewhere.
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“Iran and North Korea will look at Ukraine, and see another example in which commitments attached to giving up nuclear weapons were not fulfilled,” said David Albright, the physicist and nuclear proliferation expert who founded the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
”Those thinking of acquiring nuclear weapons will be even keener to have them if their neighbours already do so. The Ukraine crisis makes it unclear if giving up nuclear weapons is in your country’s interests, and it increases the motivation of other countries to get hold of nuclear weapons.”
Whether or not Ukraine could have maintained even a part of its nuclear arsenal had it not signed the Budapest Memorandum is questionable. Pointing out the need for consistent specialist servicing of warheads, and the annual 5 per cent decay of key rocket booster components such as tritium, Albright suggested that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union Ukraine could not have prevented the degradation of its nuclear arsenal for more than five or ten years in the absence of Russian nuclear engineers.
However, General Filatov, whose divisional arsenal of nuclear SS-24 rockets sited around Pervomaisk, each of which contained ten warheads and could have destroyed America “four times over” within 25 minutes of launch, insisted that had he been allowed to hold on to his missile arsenal he could have maintained it indefinitely.
Pressing the button appeared to be the least of the general’s concerns.
“If that order came, we would not have even thought about it,” he mused. “We’d do it. We were taught to do it, prepared to do it, ready to do it. Deep inside we recognised it would be the world’s end, the end of light. But we believed we would protect our fatherland.”
He paused, looking around his Strategic Missile Veterans’ Office in Kyiv for the last time, still convinced that his lost rockets, that once targeted America, could have held Russia at bay too.
“The balance of mutually assured destruction does work!” he said, eyes glinting, gazing at a picture of Atlas holding the Earth on his office wall. “Without a nuclear Atlas, the world would disappear.”