Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

52. Such a function could be entrusted to the apparatus of the Security Council of the Russian Federation by including the relevant departmentand experts in the organizational structure of the Council; such activity was supposed to be carried out by the State Military Inspection of theDefense Council and later by the Security Council of the Russian Federation.53. Herman Kann, “On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios,” Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1968, p. 39.54. R. H. Betts, “Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance,” Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1987, p. 3.55. S. Hoffman, “The State of War: Essays on the Theory and Practice of International Politics,” New York: Praeger, 1965, p. 236.56. Analysis of such mistakes should also be the subject of special training courses organized in the Military Academy of the Gen. Staff of theArmed Forces of the Russian Federation.57. Nuclear sub-kiloton warheads (with a TNT-equivalent nuclear explosive yield of less than 1,000 tons) play a special role; they have recurrentlybecome the subject of debates in the United States over the past 15 to 20 years.58. It is well known that in the Soviet Union, development of such nuclear munitions was demurred by the Minister of Atomic Industry of theUSSR Yefim Slavsky; he believed that this led to a dangerous decrease in the “nuclear threshold” and that the responsibility for the use of nuclearweapons was entrusted to the command of a very low degree. There were a number of distinguished public figures in the U.S. who were alsoagainst development of such warfare.59. The U.S. and its NATO allies planned to use tactical nuclear weapons at a relatively early stage of a large-scale war in Europe against a threat oflosing a conventional war with the Soviet Union and its allies. It was believed that the Soviet troops had advantageous configuration, structure andcomposition to defeat the NATO task force in the center, on the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany. The most perilous location was theFulda Gap. The anticipated activities included not just delivery of single and group nuclear strikes on the advancing Soviet troops, but also the useof nuclear mines, which would create absolute obstacles for the main striking force of the USSR: the armored forces. Evidently the general public(and a substantial part of the Bundeswehr command) in the Federal Republic of Germany and Western Europe as a whole were quite hostile tothose plans. This encouraged development of various formulas of “non-offensive defense” with no use of nuclear munitions.60. “Armaments, Disarmament and International Security,” SIPRI Yearbook 2007. Translated from English for the Russian edition. Edited by A. A.Dynkin, A. G. Arbatov, V. G. Baranovsky, A. A. Panayev, A. N. Kaliadin and A. G. Lisov Moscow: IMEMO RAN, 2008, pp. 560–561.61. See “Yadernoye oruzhie posle ‘kholodnoi voiny’” (“Nuclear Weapons after the Cold War”), edited by A. G. Arbatov and V. Z. Dvorkin. Moscow:ROSSPEN, 2006, p. 34.62. In the 1970s, when the Soviet-American treaties on limitation and reduction of nuclear arms were concluded, the situation of “mutually assureddestruction” and consequently the possibility of winning a war with massive use of nuclear weapons practically was not covered by the Sovietpropaganda inside the country.63. “Yadernoye oruzhie posle ‘kholodnoi voiny’” (“Nuclear Weapons after the Cold War”), edited by A. G. Arbatov and V. Z. Dvorkin. Moscow:ROSSPEN, 2006, p. 34.64. Reagan’s speech on the matter aroused a stormy reaction on the part of many Soviet leaders. By that time, Russian-U.S. relations had alreadybeen far from perfect due to, inter alia, the bringing of a large contingent of Soviet troops to Afghanistan in 1979. It was almost a hysteria thatengulfed Russia’s political class, starting with the Politburo, and a major part of the Soviet high military command. Generally speaking, that waswhat the Americans had been striving for: they wanted to make Russia seriously afraid of the prospect of implementation of the SDI program. Asacademician G. A. Arbatov writes in his memoirs, then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan, when evaluating such reactions on the part of Soviet leaders,said that “the weapons could not be that bad, if the Russians protest against them so fiercely.” Arbatov rightly believes that such an eruption ofhysteria on the Soviet side simply convinced Washington that “we were afraid of SDI.” G. A. Arbatov, “Chelovek sistemy” (“Man of the System”),Moscow: Vagrius, 2002, p. 265.65. L. Freedman, “Deterrence,” Cambridge, UK: Policy Press, 2001, p. 48.66. See, for example, M. Kaku and D. Axelrod, “To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans,” Boston: South End Press, 1987.67. M. Wallop, “Opportunities and Imperatives of Ballistic Missile Defense,” Strategic Review, fall 1979.68. See V. Shabanov, “Chto stoit za ‘technologicheskim ryvkom’ v kosmos?” (“What is behind the ‘Technological Race’ to Space?”), Izvestia, 27 July1985.69. It should be noted that at the turn of the 1960s through the 1970s, along with the development of the “classic” missile defense systems, a numberof Soviet scientists and experts considered the idea of using non-traditional weapons based on new physical principles: for example, chargesand charged particles beams for hitting warheads at the terminal stage. The scientists had started work in that area, which later proved to be a blindalley, and soon after that was scaled down. Empty structures at the testing area near lake Balkhash, which later regularly caused stormy discussionsin the United States, became the dumb witnesses of those efforts. Around the same time, i.e. 10 years before the SDI program, the conceptsof space-based BMD systems emerged in the Soviet Union under the influence of achievements in space technologies. Such an idea was first putforward by academician Gersh I. Budker, but it was criticized by academicians Lev Artsimovich and Boris Konstantinov and discarded. Anothertype of space BMD system (using interceptor missiles at space combat stations) was put forward by academician Vladimir Chelomei. He made hisBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs | Harvard Kennedy School 65