Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

In response, Russian leaders threatened to retaliate
with nuclear weapons to destroy the offending facilities.
In September 2006, Interfax quoted retired Major
General Vladimir Belous as stating that his country’s
“military doctrine envisages that Russian Armed
Forces are allowed to attack installations in foreign
countries that threaten its security.” 35 That same
month, two Russian submarines—one based in the
North Pole and the other in the Pacific Ocean—each
launched a ballistic missile towards the Kizha missile
range in northwest Russia rather than the traditional
Kamchatka test range in the Russian Far East. If the
Russian Navy sought to attack targets in Poland or
other Eastern European countries, they would launch
them in that direction. 36 Another Russian defense
analyst, Alexander Pikayev, acknowledged that Russia
could use tactical nuclear weapons to ensure the
elimination of threatening BMD systems in Eastern
Europe. 37 In October 2006, Yevgeny Buzhinsky, the
head of the international military cooperation department
of the Russian Ministry of Defense, told the daily
Izvestia that the Russian Government would consider
NATO’s deployment of BMD near Russia’s borders as
“a real threat to our deterrent forces” and “as an unfriendly
gesture on behalf of the United States, some
Eastern European nations and NATO as a whole.” He
cautioned: “Such actions would require taking adequate
retaliatory measures of a military and political
character.” 38
As U.S. BMD deployment plans continued in the
following years, so did Russian threats of nuclear retaliation.
Colonel-General Nikolai Solovtsov, the commander
of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, warned
in 2008 that should the governments of Poland, the
Czech Republic, or other neighboring countries agree
381