Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

few years later, demonstrated that the United States
and NATO could use force without UNSC authorization.
At the same time, since U.S. and NATO stakes in
a Kosovo-size conflict with Russia were expected to
be relatively low (at least, not central to U.S. interests),
threat of even limited nuclear use was expected to become
a sufficiently strong deterrence.
The decision to enhance reliance on nuclear weapons
in a departure from all documents adopted in the
1990s was apparently made while the war in Kosovo
was still underway—at a meeting of the Russian Federation
Security Council in April 1999, the first chaired
by Vladimir Putin in the capacity of the council’s secretary.
14 The key tenets of the new approach were tested
in May 1999 during large-scale maneuvers called
‘‘West-99.’’ The new role of nuclear weapons was formalized
in the January 2000 National Security Concept
and the April 2000 Military Doctrine. 15 The White Paper,
a document adopted in the fall of 2003, 16 added
the final touches.
While the obvious, and perhaps initially, the only
targets of the new mission were the United States and
NATO, subsequently Russian military leaders unveiled
that the same provisions applied also to ‘‘developing
countries, some of which have large, wellarmed
militaries.’’ 17 This represented a thinly veiled
reference to China; perhaps also to some other countries
(for example, Iran).
The new mission, which came to be known as deescalation
of conventional conflicts, is similar to NA-
TO’s flexible deterrence of the 1960s. A possible scenario
was clearly reflected in the “West-99” exercises:
a large-scale conventional attack (“West-99” actually
simulated an attack by a NATO force exactly the same
as the one used in the war in Kosovo), relatively brief
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