History has seen many empires collapse, but only once has a nuclear-armed superpower disappeared from the world map overnight. When the hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time on December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union’s fearsome nuclear arsenal was suddenly spread out over the territory of four independent countries: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. There was no blueprint for what to do next.

Mariana Budjeryn’s “Inheriting the Bomb” tells the story of how one of these new countries, Ukraine, came into possession of the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal—larger than the combined stockpiles of China, France, and the United Kingdom at the time—and decided to disarm peacefully a few years later. Ukraine’s denuclearization was far from a straightforward process. After initially renouncing nuclear weapons, Ukrainian officials sought recognition that their newly independent country was a rightful heir to part of the Soviet cache, deserving of equal treatment, financial compensation, and pledges that disarmament would not endanger Ukraine’s security.

Budjeryn’s deeply researched book, published at the end of 2022, has obvious relevance today. In exchange for denuclearization, Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia in December 1994, in a document known as the Budapest Memorandum. But Russia reneged on its promises, first in 2014, when it annexed Crimea and fomented a shadow war in the Donbas, and again last year, when it launched its all-out assault. (For a deeper dive into the memorandum’s history, see Mykhailo Soldatenko’s analysis in Lawfare.)