Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

of grand declarations that often had no link to real intentions
and actions of the political elite.
Reliance on MAD.
Russian politicians and experts remain nostalgic
of the strategic balance paradigm based on MAD and
would like to go back to similar arrangements in current
U.S.-RF strategic relations. Many of them would
actually like the bilateral strategic balance to remain
the foundation of global stability. As explained Major
General (Ret.) Vladimir Belous:
During the Cold War there emerged an approximate
balance between both sides in strategic offensive
weapons that contributed naturally to strategic stability
and the concept of nuclear deterrence based
on the central model of mutual assured destruction
(MAD) that has never lost its topicality… The process
of globalization and ‘restructuring’ of the world order
creates strong premonitions since neither a unipolar,
nor a multi-polar system would be able to assure the
desired global stability. The unipolar model cannot do
that because of the extreme egocentrism of the single
state at its center, and the multi-polar one because of
the interaction of the mostly antagonistic conglomerate
of vectors of geopolitical and geo-strategic interests
of many countries. Under these conditions, the role of
the nuclear policies, especially of the U.S. and Russia
that inherited huge arsenals of nuclear weapons and
traditional views on their military uses from the time
of the Cold War, is clearly growing. 112
Under both Presidents Putin and Medvedev, the
concept of MAD continued to form the de-facto basis
of Russian views on bilateral relations with the
United States in the nuclear sphere despite the formal
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