Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

In a review of an unpublished early draft of a
new Military Doctrine produced in 1997, two officers
of the General Staff noted that “some ‘specialists’
. . . attempted to introduce into the documents language
that would toughen nuclear policy,” but said
that these proposals were rejected by the interagency
working group charged with drafting the document.
It was decided, they said, to retain the 1993 language,
“which passed the test of time and was supported by
the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” 9
At that time, the Russian government adopted a
series of documents that confirmed earlier policy and
laid out development and deployment plans based on
the assumption that the sole mission of nuclear weapons
was deterrence of a large-scale attack. In line with
this policy, several decrees signed by Boris Yeltsin in
1997 and 1998 10 foresaw deep reductions of the Russian
nuclear arsenal.
THE ROLE OF STRATEGIC DETERRENCE IN
RUSSIAN SECURITY STRATEGY
The mission of strategic deterrence has remained
largely unchanged from Soviet times to the present
day. It is based on the traditional notion of mutual
vulnerability—deterrence through ability to inflict
unacceptable damage in a response strike.
The main mode of operation has also remained the
same—strike on warning. It should be noted that this
mode has always been a forced choice, and since at
least the late 1960s, the Soviet Union tried to develop
assured second-strike capability by enhancing survivability
of weapons systems. Nevertheless, efforts
to develop relevant systems succeeded only in the
1980s—mobile ICBMs (SS-25 Topol and SS-24) as well
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