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Russia Seeks Safety in Nuclear Arms

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Times Staff Writer

It was near the end of President Vladimir V. Putin’s reelection campaign early this year, and two days of high-profile military exercises highlighting his role as Russia’s commander in chief had been marred by failed tests of submarine-launched missiles.

But with a few cryptic words, Putin dispelled the gloom. The exercises, he said at a news conference, confirmed that Russia would soon possess intercontinental nuclear weapons capable of maneuvering in flight to evade antimissile defenses.

“No other country in the world has such weapons systems,” Putin said. “It means that Russia has been and will remain one of the biggest nuclear missile powers in the world. Some people may like it and some may not, but everyone will have to reckon with it.”

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The end of the Cold War, improved relations with the U.S. and the personal rapport between Putin and President Bush have all served to make Moscow’s military seem far less ominous than in Soviet times. On top of that, Russia’s conventional forces have vastly weakened.

The sad state of its regular military has forced Moscow to place fresh emphasis on nuclear weapons in order to protect its interests in Europe and Asia. Washington is building military bases in some former Soviet republics. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has expanded eastward into the former Soviet Baltic republics. Washington has continued to develop missile defenses.

The world may now have only one superpower, but the United States and Russia still could destroy each other many times over.

Source of Prestige

“In the current situation the role of nuclear weapons for Russia is hard to overestimate,” said retired Gen. Makhmut Gareyev, president of the Academy of Military Sciences in Moscow. “Basically it is the only factor which can still ensure our country’s safety. We have nothing else to repel strategic military threats anymore.”

Nuclear weapons also ensure prestige for Russia. Some Russian analysts maintain that their country’s nuclear arsenal is the only reason it has been given a seat at the table with the world’s major industrial powers.

“It shouldn’t be forgotten that Russia was invited to the G-8 because it has around 800 strategic missiles,” military analyst Victor Litovkin wrote recently in the weekly newspaper Moskovskie Novosti. “Strategic missiles remain the only chance to make the world respect Russia in the near future.”

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Those within Russia’s military and political elite who favor greater spending on nuclear weapons promote such views, said Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow office of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.

“I do not exclude that Putin buys this argument to some extent,” he added.

The conventional forces are a shadow of the army that NATO once feared could overrun Western Europe. Dispirited and poorly trained draftees equipped with aging and badly maintained weapons have taken a beating from separatists in the southern republic of Chechnya. A tradition of brutal hazing still leads to high rates of suicide and desertion among conscripts.

The army is top-heavy and works with a technologically outdated command and control system.

But Russia has about 7,800 operational nuclear warheads, roughly divided between 4,400 strategic warheads and 3,400 tactical nuclear weapons, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an American journal considered among the most authoritative public sources for such information.

An additional 9,000 warheads are in storage or officially out of service and awaiting dismantling.

The United States, the journal said, has about one-third more strategic warheads, but a smaller total stockpile.

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Russia’s land- and submarine-launched strategic warheads have a total explosive power equal to about 120,000 bombs of the size that destroyed Hiroshima.

A single Hiroshima-sized blast in downtown Los Angeles, according to a computer projection done several years ago by Physicians for Social Responsibility, would kill about 150,000 people immediately and 100,000 more from neutron and gamma radiation. An additional 800,000 people would be exposed to high-level radiation.

Relying on Topol-M

Although the futuristic new weapon that Putin alluded to during his campaign and again in comments on Nov. 17 may never be deployed, Russia is already modernizing its nuclear forces.

The silo-based Topol-M missile, first deployed in 1997, was designed to accelerate faster during its booster phase to counter U.S. efforts to shoot down missiles immediately after launch. At least 36 are now in service, and a mobile version is in final testing. They will form the core of Russia’s land-based missile force after 2015, said Yuri Solomonov, director of the state-run Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, the missile’s builder.

The Topol-M “belongs to the next generation of missile weaponry and differs fundamentally from everything that has been done before in this field in our country and abroad,” Solomonov told journalists in May.

Russia has had more trouble developing a missile for use on new submarines.

Many of Russia’s aging Soviet-era submarines have been scrapped. Some have been refurbished and three new ones are being built.

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“The old submarines should go to a junkyard already. It’s time,” said Pavel Zolotarev, another retired general who is now deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ USA-Canada Institute.

“And a new submarine needs a new missile to be installed in it -- more perfect, more safe, more reliable.”

Four years ago, leaking torpedo propellant caused an explosion that sank the Kursk nuclear submarine, killing its 118-man crew in what Russia’s top prosecutor called a technical malfunction for which no one was to blame.

Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said the accident on Aug. 12, 2000, was triggered by a leak of highly unstable hydrogen peroxide that exploded after contact with kerosene and the metal body of the torpedo.

Construction of the three new submarines has been delayed, partly because of missile failures. Several missiles test-launched in the late 1990s blew up before reaching their targets. A new missile, the Bulava-30, was successfully tested in September, according to a Russian military publication. Like the Topol-M, the Bulava-30 boasts fast acceleration on takeoff and other “enhanced systems” to overcome missile defenses, the journal reported.

The first of the new submarines, named the Yuri Dolgoruky after Moscow’s 12th century founder, is scheduled for delivery by 2006. All three are supposed to be in service by 2012.

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Washington and Moscow may not have any intention of unleashing these weapons, but neither side fully trusts the other, either. And both are concerned about the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.

Bush and Putin have agreed to reduce deployed strategic nuclear weapons to no more than 2,200 each by 2012. However, their agreement contributed to the final demise of the 1993 START II treaty. The pact would have eliminated all land-based strategic missiles equipped with multiple warheads.

During the Cold War, missiles fitted with multiple warheads were considered particularly destabilizing. If one side launched the missiles first, it could theoretically destroy a larger number of enemy missiles than the number it used. That arithmetic made it more difficult to reach a stable balance between the two sides.

Both Washington and Moscow now plan to retain missiles with multiple warheads, and neither is under any obligation to destroy nonoperational warheads, leading some critics to question whether real arms control is taking place.

With so many bombs still in so many places, a lot of things could go wrong. The danger of terrorists gaining possession of a nuclear bomb may head the list.

Zolotarev, of the USA-Canada Institute, said terrorists could try to trick Moscow and Washington into firing missiles at each other. He painted a scenario where three events take place simultaneously: a sea-launched missile of undetermined origin is fired toward Russia, a so-called dirty bomb -- a conventional device rigged with radioactive materials -- explodes in a Russian city, and false information gets into the nuclear weapons management system.

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“We must take into account that terrorists also get the knack of modern technologies, and to pit one nuclear power against the other nuclear power, to achieve their mutual destruction, can be a very alluring task,” Zolotarev said.

Although unlikely, he said it was a bigger threat than a war between Russia and the United States. But that possibility hadn’t disappeared altogether, either.

“There are forces in the United States which still dream of dismembering Russia and bringing it to its knees, all the way down,” said Gareyev, the military academy president. “What if these forces gain the upper hand in Washington?”

Defense Spending

Such worries, together with Russia’s new-found oil wealth and the high cost of reforming conventional forces, have combined to trigger a rapid increase in defense spending.

Russia’s military budget -- including items listed under other headings -- has grown 84% in real terms since 1999, according to calculations by Safranchuk. The official military budget is set to jump an additional 17% next year, to about $22 billion.

In the late 1990s, when funds were tight, maintenance of Russia’s nuclear forces was a top priority, Safranchuk said.

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“The nuclear umbrella was regarded as a must to be funded, and it was taking up to 80% of procurement and research and development money,” he said.

The nuclear forces lost their luster for a few years, but now seem to have regained it, he said.

Russia’s official budget proposal for 2005 earmarks $300 million for the nuclear weapons sector and $2.8 billion for military research, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported. Many details of Russian military spending are secret, but the research category could include significant nuclear-related activities.

Alexei G. Arbatov, former deputy chairman of the defense committee of the lower house of parliament, said political leaders should tell defense planners on both sides to stop regarding the other side as a potential enemy.

“Until they are told not to do so ... this will continue to poison our relations,” he told a forum on U.S.-Russian security issues earlier this year at the Carnegie Center Moscow.

Nuclear weapons take years to develop, and with the Topol-M missile, Russia has countered one element of the Reagan-era “Star Wars” defense idea of a space-based laser system that would destroy missiles during their boost stage, Safranchuk said.

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There are no details available on the maneuvering device Putin referred to in February, but it apparently is designed to protect a warhead after a ballistic missile reenters Earth’s atmosphere. Russian experts have suggested it might resemble a cruise missile, or that it could be a gliding warhead that could use its momentum and the resistance of the atmosphere to change directions and evade U.S. defense systems.

Whether or not this new technology is deployed, for the foreseeable future Russia still has enough weapons to simply overwhelm any U.S. antimissile defense.

The Bush administration, for its part, insists that the purpose of antimissile defense is not to provide a shield against Russia but against a small number of missiles launched by a rogue state such as North Korea.

Pentagon officials say they closely monitor advances in ballistic missile technology by countries such as Russia and China, especially those that may affect plans for U.S. defense systems.

“We’d be fools to think that Russia is not taking steps to develop its ballistic missile capabilities,” said one defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In the past, defense experts have said that a maneuverable missile could evade a missile defense system. U.S. officials prefer to emphasize U.S.-Russian cooperation on terrorism and on reducing nuclear arsenals.

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Brookings Institute President Strobe Talbott, a Russia expert who was deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, said that although U.S. policymakers had not completely dismissed the possibility of a confrontation with Russia, “they do not lay awake at night worrying about ‘the bad Russia, the bad bear’ coming out of its lair and threatening the United States.”

However, U.S. officials are expressing concern about Russia’s investments in submarines capable of carrying nuclear missiles because the money could be better spent elsewhere, he said.

“They say, ‘This is bad because it’s money that Russia can’t afford. It’s money that Russia ought to be spending on becoming a modern country.’ ”

Zolotarev said Russia and the United States should never allow any other countries to match the size of their nuclear arsenals. That would, in effect, require the two nations to work together to maintain strategic dominance for decades to come. Because Russia today is concerned with security closer to its borders rather than a global ideological conflict, tactical nuclear weapons may be more important than long-range missiles.

“A deterring role will be played by the tactical weapons,” Zolotarev said.

‘A Great Power’

Talbott said Russia had a choice between emphasizing military strength or other forms of influence -- the economic, diplomatic and cultural weight sometimes defined as “soft power.”

“Russia is a great power,” he said. “It is going to be a great power forever, for all intents and purposes. The question is, is it going to be a great power that defines its greatness in military terms, or will it define its power in other terms.... If they spend too much, as they have traditionally done, on ‘hard power,’ it’s going to be all the harder for them to catch up in ‘soft power.’ ”

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Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said in an interview that apart from the cost of maintaining nuclear arsenals and the danger that they could fall into the hands of terrorists, the very existence of the weapons creates a risk that they will one day be used.

“Instead of the weapons being used to implement policy, the weapons may drive policy,” Perry said. “I think that is the danger.”

Speaking at the Carnegie forum, Perry paraphrased a comment by Russian physicist and human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov during the Cold War: “Reducing the risk of nuclear war carries an absolute priority over all other considerations.”

“During the Cold War it did,” Perry said. “Today it should also.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Nuclear arsenals

Although Russia and the United States have made sizable cuts in their strategic nuclear arsenals, both still have thousands of warheads and delivery systems:

Warheads

2000

Russia: 5,096

United States: 7,206

2001

Russia: 6,018

United States: 7,206

2003

Russia: 4,850

United States: 6,140

2004

Russia: 4,422

United States: 5,886

**

Delivery systems

Intercontinental ballistic missiles

Russia: 56%

United States: 25%

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles

Russia: 24%

United States: 47%

Bombers

Russia: 20%

United States: 28%

Note: Both sides maintain separate arsenals of tactical nuclear weapons. Unlike strategic weapons, these generally have a shorter range, lower yield and are intended for battlefield use. They can take the form of artillery shells and other munitions.

**

Nuclear agreements

Here are the most important nuclear arms treaties between the U.S. and Soviet Union/Russia:

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SALT I (Signed May 26, 1972)

Limited strategic antiballistic missile defenses and capped the number of missile launchers for each side.

SALT II (Signed June 18, 1979)

Would have limited each side to a total of 2,400 launchers, with various sublimits.

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (Signed Dec. 8, 1987)

Eliminates ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 310 and 3,420 miles.

START I (Signed July 31, 1991)

Limits each side to a total of 6,000 strategic warheads with various sublimits. Reductions completed Dec. 5, 2001; remains in force until December 2009.

START II (Signed Jan. 3, 1993)

Passed by U.S. Senate in 1996

and ratified by Russian parliament in 2000.

Would have limited warheads to 3,500 with one sublimit. Russia declared treaty null and void June 14, 2002, after U.S. withdrew from ABM treaty portion of SALT I.

START III

Would have limited each side to 2,500 warheads. No agreement was reached.

**

Increased spending

Russia plans a big hike in its military budget next year, after two years of small adjustments.

2000: 9%

2001: 28%

2002: 19%

2003: 9%

2004: 2%

2005: 17%

Sources: Center for Defense Information; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; U.S. State Department; Dr. Nikolai Sokov, Monterey Institute of International Studies. Graphics reporting by Tom Reinken

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