Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

econsider its key postulates. Already on September 6,
2008, at the meeting of the RF State Council, the Russian
President announced “the discussion of Russia’s
new foreign policy strategy,” i.e., the renewed work
on revising the Concept, to proceed together with activities
aimed at “national security consolidation.” 103
On May 12, 2009, in his decree No. 537, Dmitrii
Medvedev approved still another Russian doctrinal
document—“The Strategy of National Security of the
Russian Federation to 2020” (NSS). In a sense, it replaced
the ill-fated Foreign Policy Concept signed into
law less than a year before. 104 The document reiterated
that the United States and NATO present threats to
Russian military security:
Threats to (Russian) military security include: policies
of a number of leading foreign countries aimed
at attainment of overwhelming dominance in the military
sphere, primarily in strategic nuclear forces, by
means of developing precision, information and other
high-tech means of military warfare; strategic weapon
systems with non-nuclear warheads; formation, in a
unilateral fashion, of the global system of anti-missile
defense and militarization of the outer space, which
may lead to a new loop in the arms race, as well as
proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological technologies,
production of mass destruction weapons or
their components and means of delivery. The state of
the military security of the Russian Federation and its
allies is being further negatively affected by the departure
from international agreements in the area of
the limitation and reduction of weapons, as well as by
actions aimed at the disruption of the stability of the
systems of state and military command, missile early
warning, space control, the functioning of strategic
nuclear forces, installations of nuclear warhead storage,
nuclear energy, nuclear and chemical industries,
and other potentially hazardous installations. 105
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