Nuclear security

Plan was floated to wipe Soviet debt in exchange for nuclear disarmament, files show

Britain was urged to write off billions of dollars of Soviet debt in return for nuclear disarmament, declassified documents show. The 1991 plan was designed to stop nukes falling into the wrong hands after the USSR collapsed.

Then-British Prime Minister John Major received a letter from Jacques Attali, head of the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), suggesting how to deal with the dangers of the Soviet Union’s collapse. “Dear John,” Attali wrote, “as you know the world’s main problems with the Soviet Union today are debt and nuclear weapons.

“I should therefore like to propose that we think about using one problem to solve another, that is to say, the organization of debt-nuclear swap – the partial or total exchange of nuclear weapons against debt relief. The price of world peace might only amount to some 1 percent of the combined annual defense budgets of the G7 [nations].”