Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

fight using such weapons. Consequently, there will be
enormous opposition to any plans for further reductions
or curtailment of this modernization program.
Likewise, Moscow has consistently said that the
deployment of U.S. missile defenses in Europe and
Asia will disrupt existing balances of strategic forces
and undermine global and regional stability. 59 Moscow
also tried hard to link the new treaty to the removal or
missile defenses from Central and Eastern Europe. 60
In addition, Russia’s leaders openly contend that one
cannot discuss European security without taking into
account the missile defense issue or the Conventional
Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. 61 Certainly, Russian officials
see the weaponization of space, the integration
of space and terrestrial capabilities, missile defenses,
the Reliable Replacement Weapons (RRW), and the
U.S. global strike strategy as a part of a systematic,
comprehensive strategy to threaten Russia. As Pavel
Podvig has observed:
One of the consequences of this [U.S. military strategy]
is that if the promises held by the revolution in
military affairs materialize, even incompletely, they
may significantly lower the threshold of military intervention.
And this is exactly the outcome that Russia
is worried about, for it believes that the new capabilities
might open the way to a more aggressive interventionist
policy of the United States and NATO that may
well challenge Russia’s interests in various regions
and especially in areas close to the Russian borders. 62
So in response, Moscow must threaten Europe. Indeed,
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeatedly has
invoked the now habitual, but no less mendacious,
charge that missile defenses in Europe, systems that
allegedly used to be regulated by bilateral agreements
312