Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future - Strategic ...

tary and foreign policy, many political appointees and
professionals currently in charge of this policy have
strong backgrounds in the Soviet system. 3
SOVIET EXPERIENCE: NUCLEAR WEAPONS
AND ARMS CONTROL IN THE PURSUIT OF
PARITY
Starting in the early-1950s, the Soviet leadership,
driven by the need to buy time to bridge the technological
gap in nuclear weapons and delivery systems
with the United States, put a huge effort into disarmament
negotiations and debates at the United Nations
(UN). They regarded these efforts as a vital means of
slowing down, if not reversing, the U.S. progress in developing
advanced weapon systems while the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) accelerated its
own weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.
Nuclear disarmament, or rather the politics of nuclear
disarmament, had also become a central component of
the “peaceful competition of opposite social systems”
promoted by the communist regime.
Fiery demagogue Nikita Khrushchev put his
unique stamp on nuclear disarmament at the UN by
proposing in 1959 a patently unrealistic, but ideologically
enticing, plan of “general and complete disarmament”
that would start with the nuclear-missile
arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States.
From that time on, the Soviets often began negotiating
processes by launching initiatives that had little or no
chance of acceptance by the opposite side but could
score big in the “war of ideas,” particularly among
the “progressive world public opinion,” e.g., the antiwar
and antinuclear groups in the West. Additional
advantages of this methodology were to draw oppo-
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