Tactical Nuclear Weapons and NATO.pdf - Program on Strategic ...

dem<strong>and</strong> additional actions of a political-military <strong>and</strong>
military-technical nature. At the same time, Kokoshin
asserted that Russia is willing, as in the past, to seek a
“constructive resolution of problems if the other side
will be prepared to do so.” He put the current problem
over missile defense in the context of many decades
earlier when missile defense periodically complicated
U.S.-Russian relations. 20 He was clearly saying that
this crisis would also pass.
<strong>Tactical</strong> nuclear weapons figured prominently in
Medvedev’s rhetoric. Unlike missile defense, they
have not, however, been an intense topic of negotiations
between the United States <strong>and</strong> Russia until recently.
At the end of the Cold War, both sides made
pledges to reduce their tactical nuclear arsenals. In
1987 the United States <strong>and</strong> the Soviet Union signed
the Intermediate Range <strong>Nuclear</strong> Forces (INF) Treaty
that banned each side’s intermediate-range nuclear
forces <strong>and</strong> broke the intermediate linkage between
battlefield nuclear weapons <strong>and</strong> strategic ones. Their
militarized confrontation in Europe disappeared in
1989 with the Velvet Revolutions. Both the United
States <strong>and</strong> the Soviet Union (<strong>and</strong> then Russia) had
good reasons to reduce their existing tactical nuclear
arsenals. Two decades later, attention has returned to
U.S. <strong>and</strong> Russian TNWs in a very different geopolitical
<strong>and</strong> military-technical context.
TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Then <strong>and</strong> Now.
How one looks at the TNWs of the Russian Federation
depends very much on the prism <strong>and</strong> the connections
made between these weapons <strong>and</strong> Russia’s
124