Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

CONCLUSION: PERCEPTIONS AND REALITIES
DEFINING RUSSIAN DOCTRINES
Barring unpredictable major changes at the top of
the Russian ruling elite or dramatic transformations in
the internal Russian situation and/or Russia’s international
environment, Russian doctrinal thinking will
continue to be affected by the following circumstances,
considerations, and perceptions that contributed to
the emergence recent Russian strategic documents.
Paranoiac Threat Assessments.
Despite repeated calls for strategic partnership
between Russia and the West, and limited progress
in select areas, such as arms control, as well as some
cooperation in areas where Russian and U.S. interests
and policies converge, the ruling political elite
in Moscow remains deeply suspicious of American
intentions and policies. The Russians usually see
American advances, especially in the geopolitical and
military-technological areas, as intrinsically inimical
to Russian interests. In a typical alarmist assessment
by Colonel General Andrei Nikolaev, Chairman of the
State Duma Defense Committee:
The gap between good intentions on establishing
world peace and the real policy on the use of force
is not diminishing but expanding. Tendency to militarizing
the international life is becoming more and
more awesome. . . . In recent years some progress
was achieved in the sphere of reducing and limiting
weapons. However, that process mostly involved
qualitative parameters of the “man-killing industry”,
while quantitative transformations in the area of the
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