AUK invites you to the online AUK Talks “Inheriting the bomb: a history of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament and why it matters” with Mariana Budjeryn, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate of Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center.

Language of the event: English (without translation).

About AUK Talks Speaker

Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. She is the author of the book “Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), which tells about the collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed the specter of the largest wave of nuclear proliferation in history, and why Ukraine ultimately chose the path of nuclear disarmament. Drawing on extensive archival research in the former Soviet Union and the U.S., Budjeryn uncovered a fuller and more nuanced narrative of post-Soviet denuclearization. She reconstructed Ukraine's path to nuclear disarmament to understand how its leaders made sense of the nuclear armaments their country inherited. Among the various factors that contributed to Ukraine's nuclear renunciation, including diplomatic pressure from the United States and Russia and domestic economic woes, the NPT stands out as a salient force that provided an international framework for managing the Soviet nuclear collapse.

Before Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, Mariana Budjeryn held appointments as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow with MTA, and the International Security Program, a fellow at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and as a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.