Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

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A much more realistic scenario implies the acquisition of nuclear weapons by radical politicalforces using terrorism as an instrument for struggle (which is a more correct term than “terrorists”),as a result of a sharp de-stabilization of the domestic political situation in a particularcountry and the destruction of its strategic management system, including the special system ofcontrol of nuclear weapons.Such concerns have lately been voiced most frequently with regard to Pakistan.At the same time, a transfer of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles to a terrorist organizationby a particular country should not be completely ruled out. Such a decision may be primarilyrelated to at least two circumstances: first, an extraordinary situation within the government of acountry that has nuclear weapons; and second, an instance of close cooperation between a radicalnon-state organization that is ready to use nuclear weapons, and the authorities of a countrythat has nuclear weapons, whereby the power and the influence of such an organization must beat least comparable to the power and the influence of the state apparatus of the country that possessesthe nuclear weapons.In such an extraordinary situation, the country that has the nuclear weapons may mean to threatenthe outside forces’ nuclear strikes on its own nuclear facilities. If such a threat is perceived asreal, it is possible to assume that an actor who is afraid of losing possession of nuclear weaponsmay decide to disperse those weapons by transferring them to the terrorists, who are ready touse them on the territory of the country that is planning to deliver a preemptive strike against itsnuclear facilities.Analyzing the latter circumstance, we can recall a number of precedents in history when secretterrorist organizations had close relations with the official state authorities of certain countries.For example, in 1914, on the eve of World War I, the terrorist attack of student Gavrilo Principon Austro-Hungarian Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia, which triggered the war, was the result ofactivities of radical organizations that used terrorist methods and had well-established roots inthe Serbian General Staff.48Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions
Chapter 11: Selected Observations on the “Dyad” Relationship between theRussian Federation and the United StatesDespite the worsening of U.S.-Russia relations in recent years caused by the policy of the RepublicanAdministration of George W. Bush, these relations did not escalate into a new Cold War, andthe general background for securing strategic stability became more auspicious than it had beenfor the greater part of the second half of the 20th century. However, from the material point ofview, a number of parameters related to the securing of strategic stability look much worse todaythan they did in the past.It is possible to highlight the following circumstances that have an adverse effect on the perspectivesof securing of strategic stability.In 2002, the Bush administration unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty between theUnited States and the Soviet Union, which had been of indefinite duration. That was a heavy,probably irreparable blow to the strategic stability of the dyad structure and of global stability asa whole. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration carried on negotiations with Russia to definethe distinction between strategic and non-strategic missile defense, with the aim of modifying the1972 ABM Treaty. Let us recall that the ABM Treaty imposed serious limitations on the deploymentin outer space of attack weapons that could be used for both missile defense and anti-satellitepurposes. At present, there are no legal or contractual limitations on the deployment of strikeweapons in outer space, except for the deployment of nuclear weapons in space. Development of anational missile defense system became one of the principal issues of the Bush administration. Asdistinguished Harvard professor and U.S. political scientist Graham Allison has said, the developmentof a missile defense system had become a matter of faith for the Bush administration, butnot a matter of policy or military strategy. In the last few years, Congressional Republicans led bythe late Jesse Helms, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated that the 1972U.S.-Soviet ABM Treaty had lost its legal force after the dissolution of the USSR, and therefore refusedto ratify the 1997 ABM-TMD Demarcation Protocols. We should not expect the emergenceof a similar document, given that President Barack Obama has given his formal assurances to theU.S. Congress that there would be no constraints on U.S. missile defense. 95Meanwhile, the ABM factor is becoming an increasingly weighty issue alongside the achievementof reductions in the parties’ nuclear arsenals, warhead stockpiles and delivery vehicles. This wasrecurrently sized up in Russia through a series of computer simulations in the 1980s and 1990s.The ABM factor may be neutralized only by enhancing the combat stability of Russia’s strategicnuclear forces (SNF), improving their invulnerability by concealing the bases where they are located,and increasing their ability to break through missile defense systems. All these activities areexpensive, and sometimes very expensive. Pursuit of the optimal profile of Russia’s SNF based onthe “cost-efficiency-attainability” criterion is a very important task that requires various methodsof system analysis and operational research, including mathematical computer simulation andsupercomputer simulation.Having considerably greater economic and scientific-technical capabilities than Russia, the UnitedStates was able, over the past 15 to 18 years, to afford more large-scale measures to maintain theBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs | Harvard Kennedy School 49
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