Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

military. In the absence of such a capability, Russia
will be forced to gamble even more on theater nuclear
forces and be even less willing to consider reductions
in its nonstrategic nuclear forces. In the context of an
increasing military confrontation on the Korean peninsula
and periodic tensions between Washington
and Beijing over Taiwan, Russia’s increased fear of
China’s growing power and its military response adds
one further complication to Eurasian security for all
parties and makes Asian nuclear force reductions an
even more complex problem for Washington to manage.
Recent Russian statements on global zero have
made it clear that Moscow expects the process to be
long, out to 2045 and to involve multilateral discussions
about nonstrategic nuclear weapons among all
nuclear powers as part of a matrix of global security. 73
There is now more evidence of a debate within
the Russian national security elite on China’s role in
Russian national security. Recently, Sergei Kazennov,
geopolitics expert with the Russian Academy
of Sciences, and Vladimir Kumachev, with the Russian
Government’s Institute of National Security and
Strategic Research, took issue with Khramchikhin’s
pessimistic reading of Russia’s military capacity to resist
China. They did not disagree with his analysis of
Chinese military progress or his assessment of the balance
of conventional forces, but said that Russia had
sufficient nuclear-armed missile forces to engage in
both counterforce and countervalue targeting against
China. 74 In fact, they accused Khramchikhin of hyping
a hypothetical conflict between Russia and the PRC,
when such a conflict was not even a remote possibility.
The authors did drag out the well-worn threat of
a Sino-U.S. conspiracy to divide Russia in something
like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. They ac-
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