Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
9/26/2014
After Russian President Vladimir Putin made remarks earlier this month boasting of Moscow’s nuclear capabilities, a Sept. 22 article published by Russian state-owned RIA Novosti reports that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin announced this week that Russia will renew its strategic nuclear forces by 100 percent, up from the 70 percent originally announced. The announcement comes at a time when U.S. military and Congressional officials have cited the need for vastly increased U.S. nuclear modernization to counter any potential Russian nuclear threat that could potentially emerge from a tense bilateral relationship recently marred by accusations that Russia violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and continuing Russian military actions in eastern Ukraine. “The formation of the technical basis for strategic nuclear forces (SNF) is going at a faster rate, and, in fact, we will renew not 70 percent of the SNF, but 100 percent,” Rogozin told RIA Novosti. “Should we amaze our colleagues and it is necessary to brandish all types of weaponry to surprise them? Something must be preserved as a quiet secret for yourself to surprise at the most critical moment.”
Experts: Russian Announcement Not as Significant as It May Seem
Pavel Podvig, an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, wrote in a Sept. 25 email to NS&D Monitor that Russia’s announced modernization most likely does not entail a major change from original plans, and probably will equate to a one-year acceleration of force modernization. “So all ICBMs will be replaced by 2020,” Podvig wrote. “Russia has been planning to deploy new ICBMs, like Topol-M and RS-24 Yars, and to withdraw the older ones—SS-25, SS-19 and SS-18—from service. … The same with strategic submarines—it appears that Russia is on track with building eight Project 955 Borey submarines by 2020. Old Delta IIIs and Delta IVs will be withdrawn from service.” Podvig also noted that he did not expect the declared modernization increase to affect U.S. modernization plans. “All this has been anticipated and the fact that Russia might deploy some systems a couple of years earlier than it planned to would not change anything,” he said.
Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, played down the RIA Novosti article this week. In a written response to NS&D Monitor, Kristensen said that Rogozin was referring to a decades-long nuclear modernization program that deployed its first missile in 1997. “This is not new and the journalist seems to be mixing apples and oranges,” Kristensen wrote. “As of now, new missiles make up about 35 percent of the ICBM force and the goal is 97 percent by 2020.” Russia has about 304 ICBMs, and as it replaces older missiles with newer ones, the country will reduce the size of its ICBM force to 250 by the early 2020s, Kristensen said. “There is a tendency in Russia to make big-percentage statements to sound big and successful. But this is a program that has been underway for more than a decade and already described by other Russian officials. The ‘new’ in Rogozin’s statement is that the replacement of older systems may be going a little faster than a few years ago,” Kristensen wrote. “But be careful about the hype that’s going around these days. The build-up is more in statements than in weapons; I suspect we soon hear they plan to modernize 120 percent.”
Lawmaker: U.S. Should Take Heed of Russian Nuclear Saber-Rattling
At a conference hosted last week in Washington by Minot Air Force Base’s Task Force 21, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chair of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, said the U.S. should take heed of recent Russian behavior, including officials’ nuclear saber-rattling. “The challenges we face from Mr. Putin’s Russia are as real as they are grave,” Rogers said. “A declining power, seeking to hold onto former glory by upending the international order, is immeasurably more dangerous when it is nuclear-armed.”
In 2008, Russia began a rearmament program which will continue until 2020, the RIA Novosti article reported. Rogers noted that Russia has rejected President Barack Obama’s proposals for arms reductions below New START levels, and said the U.S. should respond accordingly. “With Russia having said a firm ‘nyet’ to the president’s offer for further reductions—and there being no clear evidence that further reductions are in the U.S. national security interest in the first place—it is time to get on with the business of building our force for the future,” Rogers said.
