This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 25th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world.

They gave those nukes up, giving rise to a popular take today that Ukraine should have kept

them and perhaps avoided Russian invasion 30 years later.

Cato's Eric Gomez details why that's not quite right.

It's very difficult to comment in podcast form on a rapidly evolving situation which certainly is in Ukraine with respect to Russia.

So I think it's useful to go back in time a little bit and understand a little more about where Ukraine was 20 years ago

and what the sort of balance of power, the balance of risk and threat that one country could pose to another between Russia and Ukraine since the mid 90s.

So take us back in time to the mid-90s

and give us a sense of the relationship between Ukraine

and the recently

former Soviet Union.

Yeah, so in 91, Ukraine declares independence.

A bunch of other Soviet states do likewise and in three of the former Soviet

republics Ukraine Kazakhstan and Belarus the Soviet Union had deployed a lot of nuclear weapons.

In Ukraine alone, they had in the neighborhood of 1,300 nuclear warheads

on strategic delivery systems. By that I mean ICBM range stuff, stuff that can hit the

US from Ukraine, making it, I believe the largest, Ukraine became the third largest nuclear weapon state overnight, essentially.

And so you have this situation where in the time period there was all this momentum behind nuclear disarmament where you know the Cold

Wars coming to an end there's a lot of political support in the US and and Russia

for getting rid of the weapons and drawing down the arsenal size.

...