Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

states, and Nordic countries to that alternative have
only served to reinforce the feeling of vulnerability.
3. As long as nuclear weapons and the research and
industrial infrastructure supporting them continue to
exist, political and military planning for their use must
take place. Planning for nuclear use involves development
of scenario-specific missions that pit nuclear assets
against real or perceived threats. These missions
provide formal rationales for continued maintenance
of nuclear capabilities, for distribution of targets, for
posture planning, as well as for research and development.
The underlying assumption of this type of
planning is the belief that certain threats are difficult
or even impossible to counter with other, non-nuclear
assets or that non-nuclear assets are less reliable or effective.
At the center of nuclear planning in today’s Russia
is concern about U.S. and NATO conventional superiority.
Although a large-scale war with Russia is
widely regarded as improbable, the threat of superior
conventional force could, according to the prevalent
logic, be used to extract political or economic concessions.
A long series of limited wars (the Gulf War of
1991, the use of force in Bosnia, the war in Kosovo, and
the 2003 war in Iraq) have demonstrated, in the view
of Russian policymakers and elite, that (1) American
conventional power vastly surpasses anything that
Russia has or might hope to have in the foreseeable future,
both in technological level and in sheer numbers,
and (2) that the United States is prone to use that force
with few second thoughts. The continuing weakness
of Russian conventional forces vis-à-vis U.S. and combined
NATO power as well as the close proximity of
NATO forces to Russian territory (making limited use
of force both more feasible and more effective) have
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