Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

Quite paradoxically, another, equally persistent
theme in the Russian approach to U.S. missile defense
programs has been proposals for cooperation. In the
early 1990s, these proposals were built around a notion
that Russia could contribute technologies developed
during decades of R&D in missile defense. These
included programs launched in the 1980s—although
the Soviet Union vehemently opposed SDI and advertized
“asymmetric” responses to it (i.e., through
enhancement of offensive weapons capability), it
simultaneously pursued a wide range of its own defense
programs, a “symmetric” response. These were
not particularly advanced and mostly remained at the
stage of research, but their scale was quite impressive—they
consumed more than half (about 52 percent)
of all spending on strategic weapons.
Since the late 1990s, Russia sought to showcase a
defense system against tactical missiles, S-300, as well
as another system, S-400 (at that time still in the pipeline),
which was intended to counter intermediaterange
missiles. Indeed, the 1997 New York Protocols,
which drew a line between strategic and nonstrategic
defenses (i.e., those that were banned or allowed
under the 1972 ABM Treaty), were carefully crafted
by Russia to protect S-400. The highest point of these
initiatives was a proposal made in early 2001, which
foresaw a relatively well-developed plan for the defense
of Europe consisting of a combination of S-300
and S-400; this proposal was overlooked by the United
States, which, under the new administration, was
moving toward abrogation of the ABM Treaty.
It is important to understand the Russian definition
of cooperation. It assumed that Moscow would
supply weapons systems (and get paid for them), be
an integral part of decisionmaking on the architecture
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