President Jimmy Carter reminded the world of this concern over the weekend, when he criticized Ukraine's reluctance to abide by earlier agreements and give up its nuclear weapons. It was a good subject tor Carter to choose on his brief trip to the Commonwealth.
Under the START agreement between , the United States and the Soviet Union, the republics were due to give up most of their strategic nuclear weapons for destruction anyhow. and when Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed an agreement in Alma-Ata promising to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it seemed that the issue had been settled.
Russia would be the sole inheritor of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
But the whole process appears to have gone astray in Kiev recently. Last week, President Leonid Kravchuk said that the former republic would probably ratify the START agreement, but only if it got something in return - like free nuclear fuel for its power stations.
In parliament, when the START agreement was discussed, it rapidly became clear that many legislators, the so-called "nuclear nationalists", were unwilling to give up the republic's ultimate defense against feared Russian aggression - 176 strategic nuclear missiles.
Other deputies complained that Russia was being given valuable, resaleable, fissionable nuclear materials for free. The new Prime Minister, Leonid Kuchma, too, demanded compensation.
What Carter did not address in his comments was whether it might be worth paying for Ukrainian disarmament.
The worst post-Soviet nuclear nightmares were revived last week when the Azerbaijani interior minister, Iskender Gamidov, claimed that his republic had four atom bombs at its disposal and threatened to use them against Armenia.
Gamidov was probably bluffing, and the occasional strains between Ukraine and Russia certainly cannot be compared to tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which are fighting a territorial war.
But in a nuclear world, it is probably worth money to the West to make sure that no Ukrainian official can make a similar threat in the uncertain future of the former Soviet Union.
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