Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

Later that year, Putin told leading defense sector managers
that: “The reliability of our ‘nuclear shield’ and
the state of our nuclear weapons complex are a crucial
component of Russia’s world power status.” 54
In addition to the traditional function of deterring
a nuclear strike against the Russian Federation as well
as securing Russia’s elite global security status, many
Russians see their nuclear forces as a way to negate
NATO’s advantage in conventional forces. The decisive
Western victories in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan
were due to the precision conventional strike capabilities
the United States and certain other NATO
militaries had acquired in recent decades. Although
Russian analysts recognized that these new conventional
capabilities further decreased NATO’s need to
employ nuclear weapons in an operational role, they
drew the lesson that Russia needed, if anything, to increase
its reliance on having a strong nuclear arsenal
to balance the conventional weaknesses of the post-
Soviet Russian Army. Moreover, they observed that
upgrading Russia’s conventional forces to American
standards, even if technically possible (a dubious assumption
given the frailties of Russia’s military-industrial
complex) would entail considerably greater
expenditures than maintaining even a large nuclear
force.
In April 2006, General Baluyevsky told a press conference:
Strategic parity in a sense of an equal number of missiles,
aircraft, and ships—this meaning is going and
has already gone into non-existence. We are not going
to tighten our belts or take off our last pair of trousers
to achieve parity in the number of aircraft and missiles
with the United States or all of NATO. . . . [Russia]
has and will have nuclear deterrent forces sufficient
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