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Russia vs the US: Star wars
revisited
By Ehsan Ahrari
Last Thursday, Russia declared that it has
"successfully tested a space vehicle that could lead to
weapons capable of penetrating missile defenses". That
was Russia's response to President George W Bush's
unilateral decision of December 2001 to abandon the
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. In doing so, he
declared that nuclear deterrence had become a relic of
Cold War years of US-Soviet rivalry. In reality, Bush
wanted to develop the national missile defense (NMD)
system, but couldn't do so without nullifying the ABM
Treaty. Russia viewed that decision as clearly aimed at
jeopardizing the uneasy, but highly relevant, nuclear
deterrence between their two countries. General Richard
Meyer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, understood
Russia's intent. He stated: "I don't think it [Russia's
reported development of a space vehicle] has any impact
on US-Russian relations. They've got to design a missile
force that they think is sufficient for deterrence, just
like we do."
Bush described nuclear deterrence
as a relic of a bygone era immediately before the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United
States. Then US-Russia nuclear relations lost their
focus because of the global "war on terrorism". However,
Russia never assigned that issue a low significance.
When the Cold War ended, a general argument
regarding the role of the nuclear arsenals possessed by
the US and Russia was that it had lost its previous
significance, since neither side viewed the other as an
adversary. However, it soon became apparent that such
wasn't the case. Neither side demonstrated a willingness
to cut drastically its large weapon inventories. As a
successor state of a former superpower, Russia assigned
high value to its nuclear weapons as the only real
symbol of its global significance. As such, it adopted a
policy of responding to the United States' every move
that was aimed at qualitatively or quantitatively
altering the nuclear balance between them.
When
Bush abandoned the ABM Treaty in order to build the NMD
system, the general expectation in the West was that
Russia would sooner or later develop countermeasures
ensuring that the development of NMD would not
negatively affect its own nuclear deterrence
capabilities. By the same token, when the Bush
administration, under its Nuclear Posture Review of
2002, lowered the nuclear threshold and publicly
considered developing tactical low-yield nuclear weapons
capable of penetrating deep bunkers, Moscow did not
overlook the possibility that such bunker-busters might
be used against Russia's command and control,
notwithstanding public assurances from Washington that
they were aimed at destroying the capabilities of the
so-called rogue states.
Russia also made clear
its new perspectives regarding the use of nuclear
weapons. The 2000 version of its national-security
concept lowered the nuclear threshold by stating that
Russia no longer envisaged the use of nuclear weapons
reserved solely for extreme situations. Instead, nuclear
weapons may be used in small-scale wars that do not
necessarily threaten Russia's existence. That was
clearly aimed at leveling the playing field in view of
an unswerving and unambiguous advantage that the US
military had demonstrated in conventional warfare in the
Gulf War of 1991, and military campaigns in Bosnia and
Kosovo.
To underscore the point that Russia
viewed the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty as a
potentially serious threat to the deterrence-related
credibility of its nuclear weapons, Moscow declared that
even if START II (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty)
were to be ratified by the duma (parliament), the
option of multiple-heading intercontinental ballistic
missiles would not be removed completely. In other
words, Russia would continue to use multiple-warhead
intercontinental ballistic missiles if the US deployed
an NMD system. However, making significant breakthroughs
in ballistic-missile technology that would overwhelm the
NMD system to the extent of rendering it strategically
meaningless was an option that Moscow badly needed.
On Thursday, Russia announced that it has
developed such a system. Colonel-General Yuri
Baluyevsky, first deputy chief of the general staff of
the Russian armed forces, without providing details,
said the device tested "was a hypersonic vehicle - one
that moves at more than five times the speed of sound -
that could maneuver in orbit". President Vladimir Putin
chimed in by using the phrase "deep maneuvering" to
describe the new capability of Russia's long-range
missiles. Other analysts described it as a "maneuverable
re-entry vehicle". Phillip Coyle, a US nuclear expert,
commented that if the Russians "had maneuvering re-entry
vehicles, and were able to veer around the sky as they
came down, that would be especially daunting for a
defense system".
These developments highlight
the fact that while the US is highly critical - and
rightly so - of global proliferation of nuclear
technology, the nuclear arms race between Washington and
Moscow has shown no signs of subsiding.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria,
Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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