Non Strategic Nuclear Weapons - Federation of American Scientists

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Conclusions and Recommendations
Two decades after the Cold War ended and the United States and Russia undertook
sweeping unilateral but reciprocal steps to curtail non-strategic nuclear weapons and
transform relations, both sides continue to quibble about the leftovers of those arsenals.
On the one hand, Russia and the United States —with backing from NATO— are beginning
to talk about non-strategic nuclear weapons. On the other hand, both sides have
to be careful that revisiting the issue doesn’t end up resurrecting some of the justifications
that were used for non-strategic nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
Combined, Russia and the United States today retain an estimated 2,800 nonstrategic
nuclear weapons. Russia’s inventory of 2,000 weapons are said to be in central
storage, while the United States retains nearly 200 of its weapons in Europe with the balance
in storage at home.
Within Russia, an old-fashioned and misguided preoccupation with a NATO threat
has delayed completion of the 1991-1992 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, prevented new
arms control initiatives, and preserved a bloated non-strategic nuclear weapons arsenal to
compensate for inferior conventional forces and maintain a sense of national prestige.
Russia has retained wide use of non-strategic nuclear weapons in its military forces, ranging
from long-range cruise missiles to nuclear torpedoes. Part of this reflects an inability
to compete with the conventional postures of NATO and China; another aspect is simply
the consequence of the absence of a Russian post-Yeltsin nuclear arms control vision. In
contrast, the United States has eliminated all but two of its non-strategic nuclear weapons,
has decided to retire one of them (TLAM/N), and appears to be on a path toward
phasing out designated non-strategic nuclear warheads from its stockpile altogether.
Within NATO, a reluctance to complete the withdrawal of such weapons from
Europe due to opposition from nuclear bureaucrats and over-sensitivity to generic security
concerns of some Eastern European member states, combined with a resurgent
1980s-ish arms control approach linking the future of the weapons to Russia’s nonstrategic
nuclear weapons, have so far succeeded in tying down U.S. non-strategic nuclear
weapons in Europe.
Some government officials in some of the new NATO member states in Eastern
Europe have deep-seated security concerns about Russia. Some of those concerns are
about Russian military capabilities. Others are about Russian minority issues, while others
stem from decades of being occupied by the Soviet Union.
Whatever the security concerns are, non-strategic nuclear weapons are neither the
problem nor the solution (the Baltic States would probably have exactly the same security
concerns if Russia did not have any non-strategic nuclear weapons). Absent an important
military mission, they have become leftovers from the Cold War that linger on because
some see them as providing reassurance in the absence of addressing the underlying security
issues. Both NATO and Russia need to address those security concerns in a realistic
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