Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

increased purchases of weapons and hardware. 20 But
this did not appease the armed forces. Even within
those constraints, we see rising defense spending as a
percentage of the state budget and possibly the overall
economy, i.e., signs of structural militarization. Moreover,
we can also see rising pressure by the military on
the budget. However, the government has gone even
further down this road.
Earlier failures in the defense sector are now generating
the tendencies toward militarization (albeit at a
much lower level than in Soviet times) to compensate
for these failures in Putin’s Russia and the continuing
crisis of the economy and defense sector. As a recent
Russian article observed, from 2000-10 defense spending
has gone from 141 billion rubles to 2,025 trillion
rubles, without leading to an equivalent growth in deliveries
as these figures were consumed by rising costs
for modernizing old models and for new models as
well as losses due to corruption. 21 Richard Weitz has
summarized the trajectory of defense spending since
2007.
In 2007 the Russian government approved a $240
billion rearmament program that will run through
2015. In February 2008 Russia’s Ministry of Defense
announced that it would further increase the military
budget by about 20 percent, allocating approximately
one trillion rubles (about $40 billion) to military spending
in 2008. Following the August 2008 war in Georgia,
the Russian government announced it would increase
the defense budget yet again in order to replace the
warplanes and other equipment lost in the conflict as
well as to accelerate the acquisition of new weapons
designed since the Soviet Union’s dissolution. This
year [2008] the Russian military will spend over $40
billion. The figure for 2009 should exceed $50 billion. 22
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