The deterrent forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Moscow (Russian Federation)
The rapid changes that are occurring in Europe and in the world at large create qualitatively new military and political realities and will force nuclear powers to make major adjustments in their foreign policy and military-technological thinking. The new situation will certainly lead to changes in both the nuclear doctrines of those countries and their approaches to nuclear forces - both strategic and tactical - as will be needed to ensure national security. This applies fully to the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former USSR), whose nuclear doctrine, like that of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is now being overhauled. It is well known that the former Soviet Union in its public declarations, including those made at the highest political level, has been strongly critical of the doctrine of deterrence. An unbiased historical analysis of the postwar period also demonstrates that military competition between the Soviet Union and the United States in the nuclear field followed the action-reaction logic, the constraining factors being primarily financial and technological rather than moral. Parity was initially interpreted as numerical equality in strategic nuclear arms and later as rough equality in operational nuclear capabilities. Another confirmation that the Soviet Union had based its policy precisely on the doctrine of deterrence is the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limits the antiballistic missile systems of the two sides to purely symbolic numbers of ABMs and effectively exposes the former Soviet Union and the United States to a retaliatory strike. Nuclear deterrence is a modus vivendi of the world we live in, and it will stay that way until nations devise a fundamentally new system of maintaining international security. The problem is that the nuclear powers have more than enough nuclear weapons to make deterrence work effectively.
- OSTI ID:
- 105170
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 1992; Related Information: Is Part Of Nuclear weapons in the changing world: Perspectives from Europe, Asia, and North America; Garrity, P.J.; Maaranen, S.A. [eds.]; PB: 302 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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