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

CHAPTER 7
INFLUENCES ON RUSSIAN POLICY AND
POSSIBILITIES
FOR REDUCTIONS IN NON-STRATEGIC
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
George E. Hudson <strong>and</strong> Evgeny Buzhinsky
Russian perspectives about general military policy
as well as the narrower subject of tactical nuclear
weapons (TNWs), also called non-strategic nuclear
weapons (NSNWs), are conditioned of course by the
foreign policy context. Students of international politics
<strong>and</strong> security policy recognize the main foreign
policy determinants as: the globalization of international
relations, interactions with other countries, the
exigencies of domestic politics, <strong>and</strong> the lasting historical/geographical
factors that always come into
play in helping to determine national interests. This
admixture is given emotional moment as they are filtered
through belief systems that often, apparently
irrationally, crop up in leaders’ foreign <strong>and</strong> military
policy statements. This chapter will attempt in its first
section to link some of the context mentioned above
(domestic politics is more fully covered in the chapter
by Nikolai Sokov) to the more substantive discussion
about reducing NSNWs contained in the second section.
In the end, it should appear evident why the Russian
position on the reduction of their TNWs differs
from <strong>and</strong> often collides with U.S. <strong>and</strong> other western
views.
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