Yuri Shcherbak: A Nuclear Skeleton in Putin’s Closet

    The influential pro-government weekly magazine "Gazeta Polska" published an article by Yuriy Shcherbak, a well-known Ukrainian writer and diplomat, Chairman of the Council of the Independent Media Forum, "Let Ukraine produce nuclear weapons!", as the main topic of the issue (October 26 - November 1, 2022).

The title of the article is on the cover of the magazine. We publish the article in Ukrainian, Polish and English.

  1.
      In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was installed in Chicago that shows the time that separates humanity from a nuclear war. The clock is controlled by a group of Nobel Prize laureates who determine the distance of the hands to the fatal limit - 12o`clock, when exactly at midnight, a global nuclear disaster can occur and the world will plunge into the darkness of atomic winter that will lead to the end of humankind.
    Today, the hand of the clock oscillates within one second from the fatal mark: Putin, the dictator of Russia, gripped by paranoia and disease of messianism, can (or maybe has already?) decide to authorize the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine. This is not a bluff but the harsh truth: living in a parallel reality, facing inevitable defeat, and turning into a miserable political bankrupt, Putin will stop at nothing to save his power.
     He doesn’t have other arguments and he has always fulfilled his threats.
     Hopes that Russian soldiers will not carry out criminal orders from Putin are also futile. 70 to 80% of the Russian society are full of hate to Ukrainian “brothers” and support the aggression against Ukraine. The officer corps of the Russian Federation, embittered by the defeats in the war with the recalcitrant and freedom-loving people of the neighboring country, is unlikely to resist the decision of its Fuhrer, hoping that the world will not react to a "small" nuclear strike.
     Meanwhile, in 1970s and 1980s military theorists proved that a "limited" nuclear war at the "tactical" level would inevitably turn into a full-scale, all-destructive nuclear Armageddon with global consequences.      This is the time for political and military leadership of NATO member countries to make a decision on Putin’s hellish challenge and understand: what was considered impossible yesterday even in someone’s thoughts and imagination, what existed only like a fantasy in Hollywood disaster movies, has become a reality today.     

     2.
     My road to nuclear topic has started with the shock after having read the book “The Medical Effect of the Atomic Bomb in Japan” by American military doctors published back in 1956. A young doctor from Kyiv who was so distant from nuclear things at the time, I was shocked by reading about the fate of the Shiroyama School at Hiroshima: the distance from the epicenter of the explosion was 500 meters, the calculated dose of (absolutely lethal) radiation was 6,000 roentgen; out of 117 schoolchildren, 37 died immediately; 30 died from burns and wounds, 39 people died from radiation damage.
     The only one left unharmed was a 2-year-old boy covered by his mother’s tender body… I then wrote a poem about strong mother’s love that saved her child from the rays of death.     It was a kind of existential pain that is possible to compare to the family memory of the Holodomor or to what I saw in Auschwitz during my student trip to Poland.
     Then, in 1986, the fate led me to Chornobyl where I saw the entire brutal force of “peaceful atom”, its effect in the form of mental illnesses, damage to blood, thyroid gland, lungs, and other organs. I tried to recount all this in the documentary novel “Chornobyl” that was published in the USA, Canada, Poland, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Hungary and other countries.
     Chornobyl has become a rehearsal for a global nuclear disaster, a warning to humanity about its possible demise. Returning from the anti-world, the closed Chornobyl zone near Kyiv, I felt the threat hanging over my city with particular acuteness.
     A possible explosion of the reactors of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant would lead to the evacuation of Kyiv and the creation of a huge territory in the center of Europe with increased levels of radiation unfit for life.
     In Chornobyl I met Academician Valery Legasov from the Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute in Moscow. He told me about the results of his theoretical calculations and practical observations: a nuclear reactor damaged during an accident or hostilities becomes a kind of atomic bomb; deliberate damaging of the reactor means nuclear war.
     The fate of Academician Valery Legasov was tragic. He told the truth about the flaws of Chornobyl type of reactors, was bullied by his colleagues and the authorities, and finally committed suicide...
     In 1989-1991 I had to deal with nuclear issues again. I was chosen a member of the Supreme Council of the USSR and became the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Nuclear Energy and Ecology and in this capacity visited several nuclear facilities around the Soviet Union.
      I was the chairman of the commission that recommended the closure of the nuclear test site in Semipalatinsk where intensive tests of Soviet atomic weapons were conducted. Semipalatinsk is a painful topic for Kazakhs who paid too high a price of diseases, birth defects, infertility and death for the “honor” of taking a passive part in the nuclear arms race.
     I remember the grim sensation of seeing aggressive Russian women, the wives of nuclear military experts, who defended the right to testing, and how cynically they denied any harm done to Semipalatinsk residents.     And then there was a meeting in Moscow at which the chief designer of Soviet nuclear weapons accompanied by several generals tried to defend the existence of the testing ground of Semipalatinsk, accusing us, members of the commission of the USSR Supreme Council, of lacking patriotism and attempts to destroy the “nuclear shield” of the Motherland.
     Despite demagoguery and pressure from military representatives of the nuclear industrial complex, we decided to close the Semipalatinsk test site.
     This story, however, has shown me the strength of the Russian worship for the Nuclear Devil. Nuclear weapon, the child of Stalin and Beria, has become one of the sacred symbols of the Russian chauvinist-imperial ideology and turned into a tool of intimidation of the world.
     Now, in the midst of Russia's bloody aggression against Ukraine when Putin began to lose the war, the half-forgotten specter of a nuclear strike has become a real threat - to my people, to the entire humankind.     

     3.
     In 1994, I was appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to the USA and witnessed the dramatic nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, which today, being a nuclear-free state, has become the object of Putin`s nuclear blackmail.
     Let me remind you that at the time of Ukraine`s independence in 1991, the world`s third most powerful group of strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles, 176 land-based missiles (130 SS-19 missiles and 46 SS-24 missiles) with 1,240 nuclear warheads, were deployed on its territory as well as 40 strategic bombers with 600 nuclear-tipped Kh-55S cruise missiles.
     On the territory of Ukraine there were also 2,500 to 4,000 units of tactical nuclear weapons that were immediately taken out to the territory of Russia after the declaration of Ukraine’s independence.     It was in 1994 that negotiations were held at our embassy in Washington, DC about Ukraine acceding to the nuclear non- proliferation treaty and transferring the missiles, bombers and nuclear warheads to Russia (!) in exchange for the so-called
Budapest Memorandum – a worthless piece of paper that was supposed to guarantee independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.
     This document was signed by the leaders of the USA, Russia and Great Britain in Budapest in 1994. The history of this memorandum is a history of illusions, naive faith in the good intentions of the world`s predators; it is a grim lesson for those
who have nuclear weapons: never give them to anyone.
     This is also a story of the global deception by Russia, which, having signed a legally non-binding memorandum, proceeded to prepare aggression against a now disarmed Ukraine.
     In 2016 Russian foreign minister and war criminal Lavrov hypocritically declared that “Russia didn’t violate the Budapest Memorandum because its only commitment, i.e. not to use nuclear weapons or threaten to use them, hasn’t been violated”.
In view of Putin’s current threats these words sound like an ominous farce.
     4.
     At the time of growing nuclear danger, I was very pleased to come across an interview of Polish President Andrzej Duda that he gave to Tomasz Sakiewicz, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Polska newspaper, in October. The president said that if Russia starts a nuclear war, “there is no future for them. Even if they (Russia) are able to survive, they will be cursed by the entire world”. Duda’s opinion about Poland’s part in the US program “Nuclear Sharing”, i.e. deployment of nuclear weapons on the territory of Poland to strengthen the country’s security, was also important.     The Polish President`s idea of ​​a nuclear umbrella over Ukraine`s neighboring state enjoyed wide publicity in the world and approval in the Ukrainian society.
      I don’t know which specific plans NATO has in case if Russia uses nuclear weapons on the territory of Ukraine. I don’t want to believe that stricken by the fear of being dragged into a war with Russia, NATO can remain content with yet another round of sanctions against the aggressor state. As a person not bound by the state discipline, I am convinced that Ukraine has to develop its own nuclear weapons as soon as possible, especially that it has got relevant technical and human resources.
     Only nuclear power and inevitability of punishment for the aggressor can stop Russia.
     Speaking at the congress of Gazeta Polska member clubs at the end of September, I put forward an idea of ​​the closest possible integration between Ukraine and Poland and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by our countries to ensure national security against the encroachments of the Evil Empire.
     The favorable response of the audience has proved the relevance of this idea.
     5.
     Putin has many skeletons in his closet: political opponents killed by him, peaceful residents of cities and villages, Ukrainians, Chechens, Georgians and Syrians, children, elderly, and disabled. But there’s one special nuclear skeleton, the last hope of this old killer. He embraces this menacing skeleton with trembling hands.
     This is how Hitler idolized his "Wunderwaffe", V-1 and V-2 missiles, which did not save him from suicide.
     We must not allow Putin to take this nuclear skeleton out of his closet.
     The free world should issue an ultimatum to Russia: stop the nuclear maniac at the
edge of the abyss!      Kill him for the sake of your children!

     October 20, 2022