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

ern theaters differ by the nature of challenge—technological
in the West and numerical in the East.
This logic appears questionable, however. The
Russian-Chinese border is primarily a land border,
but, if public statements of Russian officials are to be
believed, Russia no longer has land-based short-range
nuclear weapons. Also, there are few valuable targets
on the Chinese side of the border and, if TNW were
used to repel a hypothetical Chinese offensive, nuclear
weapons would be used on the Russian side of that
border in densely populated and economically developed
areas. Indeed, confidential interviews with highlevel
Russian military indicate that nuclear weapons
assigned to deterrence of China are strategic and airlaunched
intermediate-range, i.e., weapons capable
of reaching political, military, and economic targets
deep inside China. That is, the logic here is similar to
the one used in the Military Doctrine for deterrence of
the United States and NATO: the emphasis is on longrange
assets.
Thus, logically speaking, Russia could, without
changing its present-day nuclear strategy, reduce the
entire short-range category of nuclear weapons. Yet,
it refuses to do that. Instead, Moscow consistently,
stubbornly, and very forcefully resists attempts of the
United States and its NATO allies to launch almost
any kind of arms control measures with regard to its
TNW. Thus, up until now U.S. and Russian TNW are
still subject to only one arms control regime—unilateral
parallel statements of George H.W. Bush and
Mikhail Gorbachev made in 1991 known as PNIs (in
1992 Boris Yeltsin confirmed Gorbachev’s statement
in the name of Russia). It only remains to regret that
the Soviet proposal, made in the fall of 1991 shortly
after PNIs, to launch negotiations on a legally binding
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