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

mon belief about the role of TNWs vis-à-vis <strong>NATO</strong>: if
the opponent has superior conventional forces, Russian
needs to rely on nuclear weapons. While Russia
faces a conventional force in the European theater that
is technologically superior, in the Eastern theater Chinese
superiority is numerical, hence the role of NSNWs
should be the same as the one <strong>NATO</strong> assigned to them
during the Cold War.
It is difficult to judge whether such reasoning is
the real view; rumors about simulated use of a tactical
nuclear weapon in the Far East during large-scale
maneuvers seem to confirm it. In the Far East, Russia
does face somewhat the same situation confronting
<strong>NATO</strong> during the Cold War—nuclear weapons would
be used on its own territory <strong>and</strong> against densely populated
<strong>and</strong> relatively economically developed areas.
Yet, Russia does not have the same opportunity that
<strong>NATO</strong> had: while <strong>NATO</strong> could use TNWs against Soviet/Warsaw
Pact troops <strong>and</strong> military infrastructure
on the latter’s side of the border, Russia does not have
this advantage in the Far East because there are few
valuable targets on the Chinese side of the Russian-
Chinese border. In the absence of sufficiently reliable
information about nuclear planning for the Eastern
theater, <strong>and</strong> given General Verkhovtsev’s statement
that all l<strong>and</strong>-based TNWs have been removed from
the active stockpile, one can rely only on what seems
most reasonable. It seems that if NSNWs have a role
vis-à-vis China, they should be employing air-based
delivery systems that have longer ranges than l<strong>and</strong>based
ones.
Confidential interviews with high-level Russian
military officials indicate that the nuclear weapons
assigned to deter China are the strategic <strong>and</strong> intermediate-range
ones, that is, the weapons capable of
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