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

was particularly troubling, as Russia had regarded its
right of veto there as an important tool ensuring its
immunity to foreign interference in its sphere of influence.
It was obvious to everyone that a new round of
the war in Chechnya was not far off (in fact, it had
started in the fall of 1999, with the incursion of Chechens
into neighboring Dagestan; but even without
that, a new Russian campaign to restore control over
Chechnya was almost inevitable in the next year or
two). Moscow came to be seriously concerned about
the possible interference of the United States <strong>and</strong>
<strong>NATO</strong> in that next war—the situation being almost
identical to the conflict in Kosovo.
Little wonder, then, that even before the war in
Kosovo ended, the Russian Security Council (Vladimir
Putin chaired the first meeting in the capacity of
Secretary) commissioned the development of a new
military doctrine as the fundamental blueprint of the
country’s defense policy. From the very beginning
nuclear weapons were assigned a prominent place. To
deter the numerically <strong>and</strong> qualitatively superior U.S.
<strong>and</strong> <strong>NATO</strong> conventional forces, the new Military Doctrine
of 2000 proposed the concept of “de-escalation”—
the threat of a limited nuclear strike in response to a
large-scale attack that exceeded the defense capability
of Russian conventional forces. 10 Essentially, this
meant that nuclear weapons were assigned a second
mission in addition to deterring a global war.
Many elements of the new doctrine were not developed
in detail until subsequent years. The t’s were
crossed <strong>and</strong> i’s dotted in 2003, in a document titled
“Current Tasks for the Development of the Russian
Federation’s Armed Forces.” 11 While the 2000 document
replaced the traditional criterion of “unacceptable
damage” to the enemy with a narrower one, “tai-
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