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orders for the use of these weapons did come out of Moscow, nonetheless the Ukrainians
were able to short-circuit cut off Moscow control. They were able to cut off Moscow
links, since they designed them in the first place and had constructed the communications
links. The Ukrainian 43 rd Rocket army took them over.
From a strategic point of view, the stability of these weapons was very much in doubt.
The feeling in Washington before I went out was that Ukraine was still very unstable,
very fragile, and might not survive as a state. The weapons had to be either under Russian
control or eliminated. It became clear that the new Ukrainian government would never
give them to the Russians. Secondly, it wasn't clear in our minds that the Ukrainian
government wanted to eliminate them. The worst-case analysis was that they didn't want
to eliminate them and that they were under the control of a new, untested, unstable
military leadership of Ukrainians.
My task, as expressed by our leaders, was to persuade Ukraine to eliminate its nuclear
arsenal. Strobe's view was he had this uncertainty about the stability of Ukraine, as did
the president and everyone else concerned with the issue. The most active people in the
government in the Clinton administration from the outset were from the Defense
Department. It was Secretary of Defense Aspin and from the beginning Deputy Secretary
of Defense Bill Perry and Assistant Secretary Ashton Carter who were hard at work on
this arms control issue.
In the NSC (National Security Council), Tony Lake and Rose Gottemoeller, who later
went to the Department of Energy, but she was handling the Ukrainian nuclear question
for the NSC. And Nicholas Burns, who was later the ambassador Greece, and then the
ambassador to NATO and who is now Deputy Secretary of State was the staff man on
Ukraine at that point. So the concern was nuclear weapons. The other was the viability of
the state, what was the make up of the new Ukraine? Could we work with it? Was
Ukrainian policy going to be coherent? So there were big question marks to all of the key
issues. Frankly, we didn't know the answers to these questions.
Q: What about the Crimean peninsula or Black Sea Fleet, though, had that been solved
by this point?
MILLER: No, no, these were all live issues. The Black Sea Fleet, the disposition of the
Black Sea Fleet, a substantial naval force based in Sevastopol, Odessa, a few other ports
consisted of missile cruisers, destroyers, naval aviation, submarines, aircraft carriers
carrying nuclear bombs, and fixed radars of tremendous power. The full apparatus of the
Cold War was in place on the Black Sea and particularly in Crimea. The formula for
division of the former Soviet fleet between Russia and Ukraine was under very
contentious negotiations, as was the question of the continued Russian military presence
in Sevastopol and other bases. At the time, the majority of the Russian-speaking
population in Crimea wanted to be a part of Russia rather than Ukraine. There was an
uncertainty about the outcome of the tensions in Crimea, and this was seen as a potential
conflict of great seriousness and danger.
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