Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

emaining props of Russia’s great power status, and
create a situation in which American and NATO conventional
military superiority would be unchecked by
Russian nuclear weapons. 88 Influential Russians have
also expressed unease at transitioning to a nuclear-free
world. In April 2009, Sergey Rogov, the director of the
USA and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy
of Sciences, published a commentary in the Russian
newspaper Kommersant explicitly warning that, the
lower the level of Russia and American nuclear forces,
the more significant the conventional imbalance of
forces will become. 89 Like Putin, President Medvedev
has described Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons
as the main bulwark guaranteeing the country’s ability
to pursue an independent foreign policy in an international
system heavily dominated by the United
States. 90
On April 20, 2009, Medvedev directly addressed
Obama’s April 5 Prague speech in which Obama
called for the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.
Medvedev said that a number of “conditions”
must be achieved for universal nuclear disarmament.
These prerequisites include: banning the deployment
of nuclear weapons in outer space; ensuring that nuclear
weapons removed from operational deployment
were destroyed rather than simply stockpiled; and,
preventing a compensating buildup in conventional
arms following a reduction in nuclear forces. Medvedev
further warned that the unilateral deployment
of missile defense systems also “complicates nuclear
disarmament.” 91 The Russian people also favor their
country’s retention of a robust nuclear force. For example,
a recent poll by the Russia Public Opinion
Research Center (VTsIOM) found that, unlike in the
years immediately following the end of the Cold War,
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