PERSPECTIVES: The Peace Prize for Ukraine? (12/22/02)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

The Peace Prize for Ukraine?

A few years ago, my son and I were watching TV when a segment came on that featured a bunch of nuclear explosions. Some were in the grainy black and white footage of the 1950s: a round puff on the horizon that flattened out in a brilliant flash, then rose almost instantly on top of a long white column that expanded into an angry mushroom cloud. Some were in color - similar explosion, only all the shades of hell.

"Whoa!" my son Michael gasped in awe, and in horror. He had never seen this before, so it gave us an opportunity to talk. He was in the third or fourth grade then and already knew a lot. He'd heard of Albert Einstein and knew the formula where you take a small amount of matter and convert it into a huge amount of energy: e=mc2. What he didn't know was what I had half forgotten, how when I was in elementary school like him, kids would duck under desks whenever we heard the air raid sirens outside. Never mind that the notion of hiding under your desk to escape a nuclear bomb made him laugh.

This was during the Cold War, I explained, and the Soviet Union was dropping 50-megaton "devices" above the Arctic Ocean. (A megaton is the equivalent of a million tons of TNT.) "We will bury you!" Nikita Khrushchev growled while Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest.

World War II had ended just 10 years before in 1945. Japan was fighting to the bitter end in that war, until the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and three days later another one on Nagasaki: two bombs, 200,000 casualties; nearly half the population of both cities. The Japanese promptly surrendered.

Who would want such terrible weapons, my son wondered? Sadly, a lot of people do, I told him, but actually that's not true. People generally don't want weapons like that, but their leaders do. The United States was the first to develop atomic weapons, largely for fear Nazi Germany would get them. A few years later, Soviet spies stole the secret of nuclear technology and Joseph Stalin got the bomb. To keep up with the great powers, France and Great Britain developed their own nuclear weapons. Next, China had to go nuclear because she, too, wanted to be a great power and, besides its enemy to the north, the Soviet Union, had the bomb. Israel, embattled on any number of fronts, is said to have at least a hundred nuclear warheads. The most recent member of the nuclear club is Pakistan, which developed its bomb to counter India's. India, of course, needed nuclear weapons because China, her neighbor to the east, has them. Now it appears that North Korea has a nuclear program and the United States is about to start a war with Iraq to keep that country from having one.

Watching the ancient footage of nuclear blasts, I explained to my son that the world was crazy back then. There were two camps that conducted what we called "the arms race," building more nukes every year with ever more sophisticated delivery systems. One such bomb could destroy the entire city of Cleveland - eventually, there were tens of thousands of them. There still are, and things are still crazy.

That was one sobering conversation for a dad and his 9-year-old son.

Now for the good news! On November 12, Ukraine destroyed the last strategic bomber in its nuclear arsenal, the TU-160. An UNIAN news service photo shows a sleek, needle-nosed airplane with slender wings and a faded red star on its tail, standing crippled on the tarmac at a military airport near Poltava, neatly cut in two. That plane will never drop bombs on anyone. With that, a chapter closed for Ukraine and the world.

To refresh your memory, in 1991 Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power. Its arsenal included 1,300 SS-19 and SS-24 intercontinental ballistic missiles and more than 600 air-launched cruise missiles, along with 176 missile silos and about 40 nuclear-capable bombers. Only the United States and Russia had more.

During the Cold War a priest-like caste of nuclear strategists actively and very publicly plotted a man-made apocalypse, using arcane terms like "throw weights," "megatonnage," "ICBM's," "MIRVs" and best of all "MAD."

That was shorthand for saying "If you strike us, we will deliver tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and destroy human life as completely as we can." They called it "Mutually Assured Destruction" - MAD. Get it?

During that era, thousands upon thousands of soldiers practiced how to wage nuclear war, while millions of children in their classrooms practiced how to survive one. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine suddenly joined the nuclear lunatic asylum. Over the past decade the country has been working its way toward sanity. In February 1999, Ukraine destroyed the last of its SS-19 missiles. A year ago in October, schoolchildren from the Mykolaiv Region turned the keys on explosives and blew up the last missile silo in Ukraine. With the destruction of its last strategic bomber on November 12, the country and its people walked away from the nuclear club for good.

The whole process began in 1994 when President Leonid Kravchuk committed his country to become nuclear-free. And now it is.

As the Nobel Peace Prize Committee begins considering candidates for the 2004 award, I would like to suggest President Leonid Kravchuk. Not only did Mr. Kravchuk play a central role in the demise of the boundlessly evil Soviet empire, he also put his country on a course where today the rights of all Ukrainians are respected, regardless of their national origin. Just compare how he dealt with the Russian minority in Crimea with the way Russia has been handling Chechnya. Look at President Kravchuk's leadership in honoring Holocaust victims at Babyn Yar in Kyiv. And finally, look at his leadership in eliminating nuclear weapons from Ukraine's soil.

There are those who say that President Kravchuk's decision to put Ukraine on a nuclear-free course was a mistake. That's the perversity of the nuclear temptation - you can argue it either way. As far as I'm concerned, though, President Kravchuk made some unprecedented and very courageous decisions, including the one to do away with nuclear weapons on the territory of Ukraine. He deserves global recognition for that. The mistake now would be to deny him the Nobel Peace Prize he so richly deserves.

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