The collapse of the Soviet Union created one of the biggest security challenges of recent decades: The task of securing fissile material left unguarded after the empire’s rapid collapse and transferring thousands of forward-deployed Soviet nuclear warheads to places where they would stay out of the wrong hands. The international community could count a number of successes in the effort to contain the former Soviet Union’s nuclear materials. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum transferred the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Kazakh nuclear arsenals to Russia, while the contemporaneous “Megatons to Megawatts” program enabled the US to use material from disassembled Russian warheads in …read more
Source: Business Insider
