Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

tary’s viewpoint. Patrushev told an interviewer that
the forthcoming defense doctrine will be amended to
allow for the possibility of preventive and preemptive
first strikes, including nuclear strikes, even in the
context of a purely conventional local war and even
at the lower level of operational-tactical, as opposed
to strategic, strikes. 100 Soon afterward Lieutenant General
Andrey Shvaichenko, Commander in Chief of
Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF)/(RVSN), stated
on December 16, 2009, that:
In a conventional war, the RVSN and the strategic
nuclear forces ensure that the opponent is forced to
cease hostilities on advantageous conditions for Russia
by means of multiple preventive strikes against
the aggressors’ most important facilities. . . . Regional
instability in immediate proximity to the borders of
Russia and the CIS countries does not make it possible
to completely rule out the risk that our country may be
pulled into military conflicts of various intensity and
scale. 101
Here Shvaichenko went beyond the previous line
that nuclear weapons may be used to defend Russia’s
vital interests in a first-strike mode if the vital interests
of the country are at risk or deemed to be at risk
as stated in the 2000 military doctrine. 102 That posture
translated into a peacetime strategy of using Russia’s
nuclear forces as a deterrent against any aggression
launched against either Russia or its CIS neighbors or
against Russia if it made war upon those states as in
Georgia’s case in 2008. 103 In other words, the nuclear
warning’s strategic political purpose is to demarcate
a theater of both military and peacetime operations
wherein Russia would have relative if not full freedom
of action to operate as it saw fit, free from foreign
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