Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

ate a real strategic partnership that would revolutionize
world politics, so too in Asia, Moscow wants to
participate in shaping strategic relationships there. 144
But at the same time, Moscow has warned that if its
concerns are not heeded, it will go its own way. In
Asia that means, at least in regard to missile defenses,
enhanced cooperation with China. As Deputy Foreign
Minister Aleksandr’ Losyukov said in 2007:
We would like to see a non-circuited [i.e., non-exclusionary,
or non-bloc] system. Besides, we might make
our own contribution to it, too. Then we would have
no reason to suspect this system is targeted against
us,—If it is true that the system being created is expected
to ward off some threats posed by irresponsible
regimes, then it is not only Europe, the United States
or Japan that one should have to keep in mind. When
some other countries’ concerns are kept outside such
a system, they may have the feeling threats against
them are growing, too. Consequently, the systems to
be created must accommodate the concerns of other
countries concerned. 145
Clearly the other countries to which he refers are
Russia and China. Thus it is not surprising that Russia
publicly criticized the U.S.-Japan collaboration on
missile defenses and the linking of Australia to the
U.S.-Japanese alliance about which it had previously
been silent. Here Moscow has adopted China’s argument,
for certainly the U.S. alliance system is not
primarily targeted on Russia. Such arguing on behalf
of mainly Chinese interests suggests that, as part of
the Sino-Russian partnership, we are beginning to encounter
the phenomenon that many Russian analysts
warned about, specifically that Russia ends up following
China’s line. But this may well be because Russia
perceives that Washington will not grant it the admit-
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