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

time, it seems to believe that, in the absence of effective
conventional forces, low-yield nuclear weapons
with special effects can be used to disrupt precisionstrike
attacks <strong>and</strong> de-escalate a local war before it can
become a general war leading to the use of strategic
nuclear forces. The decision announced in April 1999
to develop new TNWs remains unexplained <strong>and</strong>
opaque because of the lack of transparency in this <strong>and</strong>
other areas of Russian defense policy.
The Russian view of its tactical nuclear arsenal
involves a very different geo-strategic context, which
can best be described as Eurasian. It takes into account
Russia’s geo-strategic positions <strong>and</strong> involves the calculations
of a great power in a complex geo-strategic
environment with multiple <strong>and</strong> diverse sources of security
challenges <strong>and</strong> threats. Russia’s avowed primary
objective is strategic stability, <strong>and</strong> Russia continues
to see strategic nuclear weapons as both the technical
<strong>and</strong> political manifestation of strategic stability. Andrei
Kokoshin has made this clear in an article celebrating
the detonation of RDS-37, the Soviet Union’s
first thermonuclear device, in November 1955. It was,
according to Kokoshin, the very foundation of nuclear
deterrence <strong>and</strong> strategic stability. Russia is perfectly
willing to engage in strategic arms reductions insofar
as they do not call into question existing strategic stability.
In response to Global Zero, Sergei Karaganov
said a polite “no thank you” to any developments that
would undermine strategic stability. <strong>Nuclear</strong> weapons
to Karaganov become that force which Goethe
used to describe Mephistopheles in Faustus <strong>and</strong> Bulgakov
subsequently cited at the beginning of his
novel Master <strong>and</strong> Margarita: “I am part of that power
which eternally wills evil <strong>and</strong> eternally works good.”
The immorality of nuclear weapons is unquestioned,
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