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

standpoint its perception is a valid one and it may also
have merit in more objective analyses. For example,
David McDonough’s analysis of U.S. nuclear deployments
in the Pacific Ocean states that:
The increased deployment of hard-target kill weapons
in the Pacific could only aggravate Russian concerns
over the survivability of its own nuclear arsenal. These
silo-busters would be ideal to destroy the few hundred
ICBM silos and Russia’s infamously hardened
command-and-control facilities as well as help reduce
any warning time for Russian strategic forces, given
their possible deployment and depressed trajectory.
This is critical for a decapitation mission, due to the
highly centralized command-and-control structure of
the Russian posture, as well as to pre-empt any possible
retaliation from the most on-alert Russian strategic
forces. The Pacific also has a unique feature in that it
is an area where gaps in Russian early-warning radar
and the continued deterioration of its early-warning
satellite coverage have made it effectively blind to
any attack from this theatre. This open-attack corridor
would make any increase in Pacific-deployed SLBMs
appear especially threatening. 131
Similarly, already in 2003 when the first reports of
the Pentagon’s interest in new low-yield and bunker
busting nuclear weapons became public, Russian analysts
warned that even if such programs were merely
in a research stage, they would add to the hostile drift
of Russo-American relations. 132 Events since then have
only confirmed this assessment and their warning.
A second major concern is the strengthening of the
U.S.-Japan alliance in the twin forms of joint missile
defenses and the apparent consolidation of a tripartite
alliance including Australia and South Korea, if not
India. For both Russia and China, one of the negative
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