Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

Even more remote is the plan to develop a new
liquid-fuel multiple independent reentry vehicled
(MIRVed) ICBM to replace the Soviet SS-18 (the new
ICBM will hardly classify as “heavy” under START I
definitions, but its throw-weight will likely be significantly
greater than that of Topol-M, probably at the
level of SS-19). 51 Development of the new ICBM is supposed
to be completed by 2016, but the goal does not
appear realistic. More likely, same as talk about the
revival of the rail-mobile ICBM, it reflects the wishes
of the military rather than definitive plans.
That said, liquid-fuel missiles have, in the eyes
of the military, certain advantages that explain why
this line of missiles is still alive in Russia unlike in
the United States. Traditionally, Soviet liquid fuel has
been more efficient than Soviet solid fuel, allowing for
greater throw-weight for the same weight of missile.
Liquid-fuel missiles have helped Russia retain an impressive
strategic arsenal after two decades of financial,
economic, and political turmoil: a large number
of these systems that had been produced in the Soviet
Union remained in “dry storage,” i.e., were kept
without fuel. During the post-Soviet period, the military
could simply take them from storage, fuel, and
deploy. This cannot be done with solid-fuel missiles,
whose length of service time period begins at the moment
of production.
Recently the SRF was criticized by the government
for being insufficiently ambitious. Reportedly, chief of
the Government’s Department for the Support of the
Military-Industrial Commission, Sergey Khutortsov,
declared that the SRF was bogged down in small-scale
programs and does not have an ambitious long-term
goal around which its future should be built, unlike
the Navy or the Air Force. The new liquid-fuel
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