Managing the Atom

Mariana Budjeryn reflects on the tenth anniversary of her native Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity.

Mariana Budjeryn writes: War never stops at the border, especially on a continent like Europe. The European Union absorbed millions of Ukrainian war refugees and poured billions of euros into Ukraine's defenses and economic survival. The war permanently reshaped Europe: its demographics, political economy, and energy architecture are shifting in ways that will have irreversible long-term consequences. All of this is because in a very real sense Ukraine already is inextricably woven into the fabric of Europe: Ukraine’s pain is Europe’s pain and Ukraine’s gain will inevitably be Europe's gain, too.

Mohammad Tabaar analyzes Iran's strategy to weaken Israel and divide the Middle East.

Tragedy is a word used ubiquitously by Ukraine empathizers discussing the horrors of the war in Ukraine. But, it turns out, the word tragedy is also popular with autocrats who are responsible for bringing those events about — but have no intention of admitting their responsibility.

Michael Lipin interviews Project on Managing the Atom Associate Nicole Grajewski on why Iran may not benefit much from its new membership of Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

While prosecuting its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has relied heavily on nuclear threats, turning the war in Ukraine into a dangerous nuclear crisis with profound implications for the global nuclear order and its two constitutive systems of nuclear deterrence and nuclear restraint. These two interconnected systems, each aiming to manage nuclear possession and reduce the risk of nuclear use, are at once complimentary and contradictory. While tensions between these systems are not new, the war in Ukraine exacerbates them in unprecedented ways. The system of nuclear deterrence seems to be proving its worth by inducing restraint on Russia and NATO, while the system of restraint is undermined by demonstrating what happens to a country not protected by nuclear deterrence. The latter lesson is particularly vivid given Ukraine’s decision to forgo a nuclear option in 1994 in exchange for security assurances from nuclear powers. Russia’s use of nuclear threats as an enabler for escalation and the specter of Russian tactical nuclear use against Ukraine goes well beyond its declared nuclear doctrine. The outcome of the war in Ukraine thus has critical importance for deciding the value of nuclear weapons in global security architecture and for resolving the conundrum between the systems of deterrence and restraint.

This article considers the relationship between intelligence and the arms trade by examining North Korea’s procurement of 86 Hughes helicopters in the 1980s. Using recently declassified documents, the article contextualises the case using US intelligence assessments of North Korea’s procurement, and considers the role of the DPRK’s diplomats in Berlin, and the Western powers’ response. This history provides insights into the use of intelligence operatives for arms procurement, the role of intelligence agencies in monitoring the illicit arms trade, and the challenges in collection, analysis and acting on the intelligence surrounding arms trafficking.

“Everyone feels helpless in the face of such violence and such great premeditated, purposeful catastrophe,” says Mariana Budjeryn, a scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Budjeryn holds a political science degree from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the 500-year-old Ukrainian university that was prominent in Orange Revolution activities. “The difference between 1939 and today is that there is no doubt what is going on and the entire world is in solidarity with Ukraine. That was not the case when the Nazis and the Soviet Union overran Poland and no one provided military assistance to them.”

Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with a blunt warning to Europe and the U.S.

But beyond sanctions and arming Ukrainian forces, what more can the West do?

“If Russia is determined to suffer some significant losses, which it will, it can still prevail and capture large parts of Ukraine. The question is: What will they do with that later?” said Mariana Budjeryn, a Belfer Center research associate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“It might be optimistic, but I do not see how they succeed,” said Budjeryn, a native of Ukraine who visited her mother last week in Lviv, a major city in the country’s west.