Yuri Kostenko - Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History

The idea of translating Ukraines Nuclear Disarmament into English was born as early as the publication of the Ukrainian edition. Nuclear weapons have been an important global issue, and the Ukrainian language alone does not reach all interested audiences. Thus, I accepted with great enthusiasm the offer of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI) to translate and publish this book in English.

From the very beginning, I received tremendous support from George G. Grabowicz, the Dmytro Chyzhevskyj Professor of Ukrainian Literature at Harvard University. Serhii Plokhy, the Mykhailo S. Hrushevskyi Professor of Ukrainian History and director of HURI, engaged more than once with me in discussions of Ukrainian matters and was most encouraging of the publication of my book. For this support I am very grateful.

The Ukrainian edition conformed to the norms and standards of publication in Ukraine, but required great organizational work and re-editing to overcome discrepancies in approaches with Western practices and to give context to the English-language reader. Dr. Oleh Kotsyuba, HURIs manager of publications, solved these challenges brilliantly, for which I am particularly grateful. My deepest gratitude is also owed to the books scholarly editor, Dr. Svitlana Krasynska, who spent many an hour with me tracking down original citations, and substantially revising and condensing the manuscript in preparation for translation for a scholarly Western audience. I am also very grateful to Dr. Michelle R. Viise, HURIs monographs editor, for her extensive work on the book, as well as to copyeditor Michael Diem and to Orysia Hrudka, our assistant in Kyiv, who helped obtain permissions for illustrations and image files. They all made a tremendous contribution to making the English edition outstanding.

My special thanks go also to Paul J. DAnieri, professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California Riverside, for agreeing to read and comment on the manuscript of the English translation, as well as to write the introduction to this book. I would also like to thank Thomas S. Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University and Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya, the Archives director of Russia programs, who both gave their support to this production of an English-language edition of the book.

Finally, this book would not have come into being in either Ukrainian or English were it not for the dedication and hard work of the journalist Iryna Lukomska, who edited the original publication. She walked the long and thorny road of manuscript preparation with me, from the categorization of the colossal archive of Ukraines nuclear saga to writing the book itself, for which I offer my heartfelt thanks.