Space, Nuclear Weapons, and U.S.-Russia Relations After the Cold War

ELI5 / TLDR

In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States and Russia did something that sounds impossible today: they worked together closely, all the way from presidents down to engineers, to pull loose nuclear weapons out of harm’s way and build a space station together. Rose Gottemoeller, who was in those rooms as a US arms-control negotiator, wrote a book arguing this cooperation was real, deliberate, and good for everyone. This talk is her looking back at what made it work, what broke it, and whether any of it could be rebuilt once the war in Ukraine ends. Her bottom line: don’t wall Russia off forever, but don’t expect “let’s just get along” to be easy.

The Full Story

Why she wrote the book

Rose Gottemoeller is not a casual observer. She negotiated the New START treaty (the most recent major US-Russia nuclear arms agreement), served as deputy secretary general of NATO, and has been working in and around Russia since the 1980s. Two things pushed her to write Security Through Cooperation.

The first was a story coming out of Moscow that she found dishonest: the claim that from the very start, US presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton set out to expand NATO right up to Russia’s borders specifically to threaten Russia. Her counter-argument is that Clinton actually wanted a good relationship with Russia, because he believed that was the only way to keep the whole region stable.

President Clinton was resolved to have a good economic, political, and security relationship with the Russian Federation because he was convinced that it was the only way to sustain stability in Eurasia going forward.

The second reason was simpler: almost nobody remembers how deeply the two governments actually wove themselves together in that decade. NATO expansion gets all the books. The quiet, practical cooperation gets forgotten.

Building a space station to keep Russia close

Here is the part that sounds like fiction. In the early 1990s, the US was nearly ready to give up on putting humans in space. The Apollo program had gotten too expensive, and the plan was to switch to cheaper robotic probes. (Gottemoeller notes this echoes today’s debates.) What rescued human spaceflight was teaming up with Russia, which had the engineering and the hardware. That partnership became the International Space Station, still in orbit, still carrying Russians and Americans together even now, during a period she calls “profound crisis” between the two countries.

There was also a quiet competition underneath it. Russia, broke and chaotic in the 1990s, could have sold its technology to China instead. Think of it like a struggling inventor choosing between two buyers: China wanted to buy the blueprints outright, take them home, and build copies. The US instead offered a long-term partnership where Russia stayed involved. For a desperate country, the partnership was the better long-term bet.

Getting the nukes out: the Budapest Memorandum

When the Soviet Union broke apart, nuclear weapons were left sitting in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, not just Russia. Intelligence was picking up signs that terrorist groups wanted to grab loose nuclear material. So the US, starting under Bush and continuing seamlessly under Clinton, pushed a program called cooperative threat reduction (the Nunn-Lugar program) to secure those weapons.

The most debated piece was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which got the nuclear weapons out of Ukraine. Gottemoeller was on that negotiating team, and she gets asked constantly whether it was a mistake, given that Ukraine ended up invaded anyway. Her defense: those newly independent countries were fragile, near collapse, and could easily have fallen into conflict with each other or with Russia. Some Ukrainians thought they could seize control of the weapons from Moscow and run them from Kiev, which she believes would have triggered an early, catastrophic war with Russia.

Instead, what we bought for the Ukrainians was 30 years in order to establish themselves as independent and sovereign.

A detail worth noting: at the time, Russia and Ukraine were cooperating well. As late as 1997 Russia formally reconfirmed Ukraine’s borders, including Crimea. The two sides even pushed the Americans out of the room to negotiate the sensitive monitoring arrangements themselves, with Ukraine verifying that Russia actually dismantled the warheads rather than redeploying them. Ukraine was paid for the uranium in cash and power-plant fuel.

Swords into reactor fuel

One of the most overlooked programs: when Russia dismantled warheads, it diluted the bomb-grade uranium down into reactor-grade fuel, which was then shipped to the US to power nuclear plants. For over a decade, a meaningful share of American electricity literally came from former Soviet warheads. The catch, and a politically touchy one today, is that this is how the US became dependent on Russian-enriched uranium in the first place.

What broke it

So why did all this cooperation collapse? Gottemoeller resists a single tidy answer. She points out that George W. Bush genuinely tried with Putin (barbecue and chainsaw brush-clearing at the Texas ranch), and that Putin responded: it was Putin who signed the 2002 agreement creating the NATO-Russia Council, which led to 15 years of real joint work, including fighting the narcotics flow out of Afghanistan.

Her assessment is that Putin was a “status quo” figure up until the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, even while things got “nastier and nastier.” Domestic factors, human-rights abuses, and ultimately Putin’s own character and ambitions did the relationship in. But, she insists, “he’s not the only one at fault,” gesturing at how NATO’s eastward growth eventually fed Moscow’s anger, especially the 2008 Bucharest declaration that NATO would one day include Ukraine and Georgia.

Could it be rebuilt?

This is where she gets practical. She is firm that the war must end on fair terms, with Russia paying to rebuild Ukraine. But after that, she asks: where would cooperation actually serve US interests?

Her advice, if anyone in the current administration is listening: the hardest but most important problem is unwinding the sanctions regime and letting Russia back into the global banking system, a grievance she says festered for decades (it took the US until 2013 to lift Cold War-era trade sanctions). But her favorite tactic is “find the easy door”:

I always say if there’s an easy door to go through, take it and start some momentum in the right direction.

The easy door, in her view, is getting back to the table on nuclear arms control. Here she makes a point she repeats throughout: run two parallel tracks, one with Russia, one with China, and don’t mash them together. On China, she urges calm. China has roughly 600 nuclear warheads; the US has about 4,000. There is, she argues, a decade to manage China’s buildup. Meanwhile the priority with Russia is preserving “predictability,” a word she leans on constantly, so the relationship doesn’t spiral.

Loose ends from the Q&A

Friendly proliferation: Some Nordic states are quietly wondering whether to build their own nuclear weapons, unnerved by US unpredictability. Gottemoeller is firmly against this, calling it a recipe for instability, and points instead to the recently modernized US nuclear presence in Europe (new B61-12 warheads, F-35s certified to carry them) and visible NATO exercises as the better deterrence signal.
Space traffic management: As more satellites crowd orbit, the US, Russia, and China all share an interest in avoiding collisions. She sees this as a rare “easy door” for early cooperation with both Moscow and Beijing.
AI and nuclear weapons: She flags artificial intelligence’s effect on nuclear stability as something that urgently needs sophisticated US-Russia-China discussion.
Risk-reduction centers: She praises a low-glamour but valuable mechanism, a communications hub that makes sure all government agencies get the same nuclear notification at the same time, and notes Chinese experts have shown surprising interest in copying it.
The biggest lesson: Asked what young people should take from the post-Cold War era, she gives a striking answer aimed partly at the US itself: never take democracy for granted. The American assumption that Russia would naturally embrace democracy after “we won” was, she says, the single biggest mistake of the period.

Key Takeaways

After the USSR collapsed, US-Russia cooperation ran deep, from presidents down to engineers, and produced the International Space Station and the securing of loose Soviet nuclear weapons.
Partnering with Russia is what saved US human spaceflight in the 1990s; the alternative was abandoning it for robotic probes.
The US deliberately offered Russia long-term partnership to keep it from selling its technology to China, which wanted to buy blueprints and build copies itself.
The 1994 Budapest Memorandum removed nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus; Gottemoeller defends it as buying Ukraine 30 years to consolidate as a sovereign state.
In the 1990s Russia and Ukraine cooperated directly, even pushing US negotiators out of the room; Russia reconfirmed Ukraine’s borders including Crimea as late as 1997.
Dismantled Soviet warheads were down-blended into reactor fuel that powered US plants for over a decade, which is also how the US became dependent on Russian-enriched uranium.
Cooperation continued longer than most remember: Putin signed the 2002 NATO-Russia Council; the partnership only fully collapsed with the 2014 seizure of Crimea.
Gottemoeller blames the breakdown on a mix of Putin’s character and ambitions plus the weight of NATO’s expansion, refusing a single-cause story.
Her policy prescription: run separate arms-control tracks for Russia (preserve predictability) and China (stay calm, China has ~600 warheads vs. US ~4,000, with a decade to manage the gap).
“Friendly proliferation” (allies building their own nukes) is, in her view, a recipe for instability, not security.
Space traffic management and collision avoidance are a rare near-term opening for cooperation with both Moscow and Beijing.
Her central lesson for the next generation: do not take democracy for granted, including at home.

Claude’s Take

This is a panel discussion, not a lecture, so it rambles where a written essay would tighten, and the transcript is full of half-finished sentences and a garbled stretch or two. But the substance is unusually credible because Gottemoeller was physically in the rooms she’s describing, including the Budapest negotiations. That’s the value here: not analysis you could get from any think-tank pundit, but firsthand texture, the chainsaw at the Crawford ranch, the satchels of cash demanded for jet fuel in 1993, the bomb-sniffing dogs at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

The honest caveat is that she has skin in the game. She negotiated Budapest, so her defense of it (“we bought Ukraine 30 years”) is also self-defense, and she flags as much: “It’s a flawed argument in some respects.” Her account of why cooperation collapsed leans gently toward “Putin’s fault, but NATO didn’t help,” which is a defensible middle position but also a comfortable one for someone who spent her career building that cooperation. A sharper critic might push harder on whether the 1990s “partnership” was ever as mutual as Washington believed, or whether Russian elites experienced it as managed decline.

Score 7. Genuinely informative primary-source recollection from a serious practitioner, with concrete history you won’t find packaged elsewhere, and a coherent, non-hysterical framework for thinking about arms control with both Russia and China. It loses points only for the loose panel format and the fact that it’s one well-placed insider’s perspective rather than a debate, so the optimistic read on cooperation goes mostly unchallenged.