IMPACT OF NMD ON RUSSIA, NUCLEAR SECURITY
BY MANZOOR HUSSAIN MEMON*

THE RUSSIAN NUCLEAR ARSENAL

Russia's economic decline has taken a large toll on Russian security during the past decade. Its military cannot adequately perform the traditional missions that are essential to the country's security-air surveillance, defense of airspace, territorial defense against external invasion, border control, and maintenance of internal cohesion. The sole exception is nuclear deterrence, and even this mission is becoming more burdensome.

Russia's NMD Concerns

Russia must now confront the theoretical possibility that a future U.S. national missile defense (NMD) system would be the straw that breaks the back of Russia's nuclear deterrent. Russia today can barely cope with U.S. offensive power, let alone a combination of offense and defense, a one-two punch they fear could deliver the knockout blow to their strategic forces.

The Pentagon argues that the NMD system is very limited and could protect only against a threat from a few dozen warheads, compared to the one to two thousand warheads that Russia would posses under the proposed START III Treaty over the next decade and thereafter. Such an abundant force, the Clinton Administration argues, will give Russia "the certain ability to carry out an annihilating counterattack on the other side regardless of the conditions under which the war began."

In the future (2010-2015), the total size of the Russian force could easily drop below 500 warheads, in which case the protection afforded by a "very limited" U.S. NMD system would loom even larger in Russia's estimation. A few tens or even hundreds of deliverable Russian warheads is not an acceptable number of surviving weapons from a Russian standpoint, just as several hundred surviving U.S. weapons would not be acceptable to the United States.

These calculations of Russia's vulnerability-shocking from Moscow's point of view-were nearly irrelevant as long as Russia credited the West with benign political intentions. This discount all but evaporated with NATO's war on Yugoslavia. The war jolted Russia into the realization that NATO could rally politically and militarily around an offensive assault on a sovereign state, and could act unilaterally outside U.N. auspices as well as the NATO-Russia Founding Act. U.S. cruise missiles had enough range to reach Moscow from Kosovo airspace and the Adriatic.

The heavy bombing punctured any Russian illusion, or Western pretense, that NATO is a strictly defensive alliance. It was a defining moment in Russia's perception of NATO's potential to turn on Russia, and within the precincts of conservative Russian military planning this watershed moment is resurrecting a number of threatening scenarios that had been previously shelved and perhaps repressed. Despite their implausibility from an American standpoint, these scenarios of concern to Russia range from Western military

intervention in Chechnya, to NATO attacks on Russia's nuclear forces using smart conventional weapons, to U.S. nuclear strikes against the Russian homeland.

Moscow's Response

If Russia wants to overwhelm an NMD shield it must plan to launch massively and quickly in a crisis, either firing first or firing on warning from a deteriorating network of early warning satellites. Russia must get its forces off the ground before incoming U.S. missiles can strike them.

In response to NMD, the alert rates of missile submarines at sea and road-mobile rockets on land might be increased, and Russia's SS-18 force might increase its readiness to launch on warning, even if it means breaching the 1994 Clinton-Yeltsin de-targeting pact. In striving to ensure that its missile forces in silos and on dockside alert can get off the ground before incoming U.S. missiles can strike them, Russia might heighten the readiness of its early warning radars and nuclear command posts. Russia's increased emphasis upon such accident-prone quick launch options would be solidified if the United States deploys a national missile defense in this decade. To deal with this new development, Russia would likely deploy multiple warheads on its new land-based Topol M strategic missile, and might consider extreme responses including the fielding of space mines designed to disable the NMD's space-based sensor system in the event of U.S.-Russian hostilities.

Resolving the NMD Conundrum: Offensive Weapons Cuts

American officials dismiss Russia's suspicions of NMD as unwarranted on the grounds that U.S. defenses are not aimed at Russia at all, except for possible scenarios of accidental Russian launches. But Americans cannot dictate Russian perceptions. Russian suspicions, while perhaps unfounded, are understandable in the light of recent setbacks in U.S.-Russian relations and of statements such as the following taken from a 1995 analysis prepared for Congress by the Pentagon's BMDO: Defenses against the Former Soviet Union ballistic missile threat ". . .could augment deterrence by significantly increasing the Soviet planners' doubts that any military attack on the United States could succeed".

These Russian planners' worries include doubts about their ability to respond at all to an American attack. They fear that the combination of U.S. offensive firepower and a defensive shield could eviscerate their deterrent force and demolish the stability of U.S.-Russian nuclear relations.

While fielding a U.S. missile defense could redound to their grave disadvantage, disruption of U.S.-Russian relations and of strategic stability might be avoided if fully offsetting reductions in offensive forces are made. If severe constraints on offensive firepower are imposed then missile defenses may be tolerable, and in fact in theory stability could even be strengthened. One promising formula for striking a stable balance between offense and defense is to cut deeply the offensive missile arsenals and take all silo-busting U.S. warheads off alert and put them in long-term storage. By de-alerting most or all of the current 2,200 U.S weapons on high alert, a U.S. national missile defense would appear far less threatening to Russia. Russian strategic missiles would be far less vulnerable to sudden U.S. offensive forces, and thus they would be far more capable of overwhelming U.S. defenses. Russia in fact would be able to de-alert its own strategic missiles and thereby greatly reduce the risk of a mistaken or unauthorized Russian missile attack.

 Unfortunately, neither country is presently pursuing this formula. They have instead embarked on a collision course with Russia that threatens to increase, not decrease, the nuclear peril to Americans.

Conclusion

President Valdamir Putin did not rule out a modification of the ABM agreement, But said such decisions should be made in consultation rather than unilaterally.

The START treaties are aimed to reducing the number of nuclear warheads held by both countries and placing limits on the amount of missiles each side could deploy.

• Russia views the NMD program as a real threat to its nuclear deterrent forces and thus to its national security.
• Russia will respond to NMD deployment in ways that increase U.S.-Russian nuclear tensions and the risk of accidental nuclear launch.
• NMD will increase the net nuclear threat to the United States. The additional danger of an accidental Russian launch will outweigh the additional protection from "rogue" state missile attacks that NMD might provide.

* Student of M.A (Final) Department of International Relations, University of Karachi.

All content (C) Department of International Relations, Karachi University

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