Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

lowed by the air force. 1 This meant that the land-based
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were the
most powerful components of the Soviet and later the
Russian military’s nuclear forces. As a consequence,
over the years they received the majority of resources
and attention. Indeed, the domination of the ground
based systems led the Soviets to ignore or at least pay
minimal attention to coordinating the three legs. For
practical purposes, they were three independent arms.
By the beginning of the 1990s, a significant part of
the Russian nuclear triad had come to the end of their
service life. After all, the majority of the missiles had
been deployed in the 1960s and 1970s. Even the seabased
ballistic missile submarines, the Yankee, Delta
I, and Delta II had been put into operation in 1968-74. 2
The Soviets were well aware of the need to modernize
their nuclear forces, but the collapse of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) interrupted the
nuclear modernization process. Moscow had planned
to deploy new types of missiles with shorter delivery
times and a shorter booster phase, and to equip them
with multi-element last stages, or “buses” to saturate
and thus disable the information processing systems
and destruction capabilities of the future American
antiballistic missile (ABM) defense. 3 Unfortunately for
the Russians, by the time the regime collapsed in 1991,
the ICBM modernization program was not completed.
The same was true of the other two legs of the triad.
In 1991, Gorbachev established the Strategic Deterrence
Forces (SDF) which unified the three legs. However,
the collapse of the USSR meant that the SDF were
located all over the country, as well as in many of the
newly independent countries. There was an attempt
to save the SDF by creating a combined military force
under control of the Commonwealth of Independent
2