Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

e dealt with as part of the NATO-Russia dialogue
regarding a new European security architecture. Moscow
would like to draw up a new European Security
Treaty along the lines of the draft text proposed by
Russian President Medvedev. These could occur
within the framework of the NATO-Russia Council,
but Appathurai said during his April 22 Tallinn news
conference that: “I don’t think that that is on the immediate
agenda. That’s not the forum in which that
kind of discussion, I think, would be held, and certainly
not now.” 84
Furthermore, the TNW issues could be negotiated
as part of follow-on negotiations to the New START,
which would cover other issues set aside in the rush
to negotiate the recently signed treaty (non-deployed
nuclear warheads, strategic defense systems, and the
use of conventional warheads on traditionally strategic
delivery vehicles such as long-range ballistic
missiles). Finally, they might be considered as part of
the discussions to strengthen the NPT against further
nuclear proliferation (many NPT parties consider NA-
TO’s nuclear-sharing arrangement a violation of the
first two articles of the treaty).
What results one might reasonably hope to achieve
from such negotiations is unclear. Even an American
offer to redeploy all U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe
to the United States might prove insufficient to convince
the Russian Government to agree to additional
TNW arms control measures. The United States could
return its short-range nuclear weapons to Europe in
a few hours unless their storage sites and related infrastructure
had also been destroyed. In addition, it
would prove difficult to verify any agreement since
attack aircraft, the main NATO delivery system for
U.S. nonstrategic nuclear weapons, are typically dualuse
systems that can also launch conventional strikes.
399