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

deployed to Europe to approximately 200. These were
scattered across <strong>NATO</strong> military bases in Belgium,
Germany, Italy, the Netherl<strong>and</strong>s, <strong>and</strong> Turkey. The Soviet
Union (<strong>and</strong> subsequently the Russian Federation)
had also unilaterally reduced its non-strategic nuclear
stockpile as part of the so-called Presidential <strong>Nuclear</strong>
Initiatives in the early 1990s, but it still retained a huge
preponderance over the U.S. numbers.
Unfortunately, the Russian Federation displayed
little to no interest in entering talks to reduce its
NSNWs following the release of the Alliance Strategic
Concept despite Alliance efforts to raise this issue in
the <strong>NATO</strong>-Russia Council. 5 Moscow argued that these
weapons could not be viewed as an isolated issue or
a simple matter of U.S.-Russian arms control parity.
Rather, they were part of a more complex security environment.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
emphasized this point during New START confirmation
hearings in the Duma in January 2011. Lavrov
observed that it was impossible to divorce such weapons
from a wider discussion of “strategic parity.” He
added that such discussion must include such issues
as “conventionally armed long-range strategic weapon
systems, the weaponization of outer space, ballistic
missile defense, <strong>and</strong> the disparities in conventional
forces.” 6
Many Russian experts have echoed Lavrov’s last
concern about Russian conventional inferiority with
respect to <strong>NATO</strong> <strong>and</strong> a corresponding need to maintain
NSNWs as a hedge. 7 It is widely believed that
Moscow had as many as 20,000 non-strategic nuclear
warheads in its stockpile at the end of the Cold War.
The United States also deployed thous<strong>and</strong>s of these
weapons to Europe during the Cold War owing to
<strong>NATO</strong>’s perceived conventional inferiority in compar-
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