Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

Russia to apply them in order to make the aggressor
stop combat actions. . . . In view of its unique properties,
the striking power of the Strategic Missile Forces
is most efficient and convincing in the de-escalation
actions. 110
This strategy also openly reflects Moscow’s bizarre,
unsettling, and unprecedented belief that Russia can
control escalation and nuclear war by initiating it despite
40 years of Soviet argument that no such control
was feasible. Meanwhile, current procurements display
a reliance on new, mobile, survivable, and allegedly
indefensible nuclear weapons, even as numbers
fall. For example, Russia seeks to keep its mobile missile
systems of the nuclear forces invisible to foreign
reconnaissance systems, while also developing means
to suppress those reconnaissance and surveillance
systems. 111 Accordingly, as Russian officials regularly
proclaim, nuclear procurements are intended to develop
missiles against which America has no defense,
i.e., mobile missiles, multiple independent reentry vehicles
(MIRVs), and fusion, low-yield nuclear weapons
that can also be used on the battlefield.
Thus, nuclear weapons are warfighting weapons.
Moscow’s threats from October 2009 not only follow
previous doctrine, they expand on it by openly admitting
that limited nuclear war is its option or ace in the
hole. If Russia should decide to invade or seize one or
more Baltic State, then that would mean it is prepared
to wage nuclear war against NATO and the United
States to hold onto that acquisition although it would
prefer not to, or thinks it could get away with it without
having to do so. The idea behind such a “limited
nuclear war” is that Russia would seize control of
the intra-war escalation process by detonating a first-
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