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

When the issue is national security, attention must be
given to the capabilities of the arms system being developed
and not to assurances, which can change in 1
hour. Moscow should not fall into the same trap that
it fell into in the past when the West promised that,
after the unification of Germany, NATO would not
advance to the East. 84
Such skepticism, distrust, and outright opposition to
cooperation with the United States or NATO in the
areas traditionally featuring in Russian anti-western
foreign policy rhetoric is more pronounced in the
discussion on TNW. Any sense that such discussions
may serve to benefit Russian security is at best a minority
view. While its U.S. and European advocates
appear to suggest that the reduction of U.S. TNW
based in Europe would result in strong pressure on
Moscow to reciprocate, Russian experts adopt a more
nuanced stance, partly based on attacking western
thinking or in pointing out the contradictions in the
strategic thinking at play. Major-General (Retired)
Vladimir Dvorkin, a senior researcher at the Institute
of World Economy and International Relations of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, 85 recently encapsulated
that approach by noting that Russia need not respond
to any future withdrawal of such weapons from Europe,
since, as he suggested, this would take the form
of a unilateral action, and Russia has no such weapons
deployed beyond its territory. Only after a unilateral
withdrawal of U.S. TNW from Europe could bilateral
talks commence between Moscow and Washington
aimed at a balanced reduction of these weapons. As
Dvorkin stated in what could only have been a passing
reference to the China factor, “This does not mean
that we must achieve the same ceilings (that is, the
same levels of TNW), since, in comparison with the
73