Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

expected the Kremlin to pursue global zero, they must
be thinking centuries ahead. 100 Washington’s strategic
thinking was, in his assessment, becoming increasingly
confused, ignoring that India, Pakistan, North
Korea, and Israel had all joined the nuclear club.
Rather than considering how to deal with the new
geostrategic situation, the Americans preferred to philosophize
such weapons out of existence, Karaganov
argued while noting the massive imbalance in favor
of the United States that global zero would achieve
based on American technological advances in the use
of high-precision conventional weapons. NATO’s intervention
in the Balkans in 1999 and U.S. intervention
in Iraq combined with the various attempts to site
components of BMD in Central and Eastern Europe all
featured in his assertion that a new European security
treaty is required, perhaps more than one, and eventually
a political-military alliance between Moscow
and Washington or Russian membership in NATO. 101
Finally, on the issue of TNW and their possible reduction
he highlighted the glaring blunder in the appeal
made by the Polish and Swedish Foreign Ministers,
Radek Sikorski and Carl Bildt respectively, in their
article in February 2010 which called on Russia to remove
TNW from the Kola Peninsula and Kaliningrad
Oblast, even though none were stationed in the latter.
He ridiculed the whole concept, pointing out that
withdrawing these weapons from European Russia
would hardly help Moscow in its relations with Beijing.
102
Europeanizing the Debate.
Within a short period, a response to the call for
tactical nuclear reduction in Europe made by Sikorski
and Bildt was the subject of a scathing demolition
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