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

By 2004, a young scholar, Aleksei Fenenko, took
on the task of redefining sixth generation warfare, recasting
it to include a place for a new generation of
TNWs. The concept of “sixth generation warfare,” as
formulated by Major General Slipchenko, had anticipated
the gradual decline of the role of strategic nuclear
forces until their only function would be to deter
other strategic nuclear forces, leaving the possibility
of decisive operations conducted by the new means
of warfare, especially deep, precision-strike systems.
Aleksei Fenenko, however, brought into sixth generation
warfare the possibility of creating a new generation
of nuclear weapons with low yields but very
high accuracy that could be used for counterforce <strong>and</strong>
counter-elite warfare without the risk of crossing the
threshold leading to the use of strategic nuclear weapons.
Such weapons would include effects based on
new physical principles <strong>and</strong> delivered with great precision.
Fenenko discussed U.S. developments in these
areas <strong>and</strong> then proposed that the Conventional Armed
Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty be recast to incorporate
limitations on six new classes of weapons: “cruise
missiles, self-guided bombs, weapons using depleted
uranium, directed-energy weapons, EMP [electromagnetic
pulse] weapons, <strong>and</strong> hafnium warheads.” 33
What in the early 1980s Marshall Nikolai Ogarkov had
speculated about as “weapons based on new physical
principles” as part of a Revolution in Military Affairs,
were now transforming warfare.
Fenenko exp<strong>and</strong>ed upon this theme in an article
devoted to the contemporary underst<strong>and</strong>ing of strategic
stability in the West. In his conclusion, he argued
that the old definition of strategic stability based upon
mutual assured destruction no longer applied. The
new weapons were making it much easier to cross the
131