Quotable notes

"Other nations have rid themselves of weapons of mass destruction cooperatively in ways that were possible to verify. So let's talk for a moment about what real disarmament looks like.

"There are several significant examples from the recent past - among them South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakstan. ...

In the 1990s, President [Leonid] Kravchuk of Ukraine and President [Nursultan] Nazarbayev of Kazakstan ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation and START treaties, committing their countries to give up the nuclear weapons and strategic delivery systems that they had inherited with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Kazakstan and Ukraine both went even further in their disclosures and actions than was required by those treaties. Ukraine requested and received U.S. assistance to destroy its Backfire bombers and air-launched cruise missiles. Kazakstan asked the United States to remove more than 500 kg of highly enriched uranium. Given the full cooperation of both governments, implementation of the disarmament was smooth. All nuclear warheads were returned to Russia by 1996, and all missile silos and heavy bombers were destroyed before the START deadline.

"Each of these cases was different but the end result was the same: the countries disarmed while disclosing their programs fully and voluntarily. In each case, high-level political commitment to disarmament was accompanied by the active participation of national institutions to carry out that process. In each case, the responsible countries created a transparent process in which decisions and actions could be verified and audited by the international community."

- U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz addressing the Council for Foreign Relations in New York City on January 22 on the topic of Iraq's "weapons of mass terror," as transcribed by the Federal News Service and published by The New York Times.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 2, 2003, No. 5, Vol. LXXI

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