Today, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that his country must achieve parity in nuclear arms with the United States. “The weak ones are not loved and not heard, they are insulted, and when we have parity they will talk to us in a different way,” he said. Ivanov also intimated that the failure to achieve equality with the United States will result in the loss of Russian independence.
Russia has about 4,200 strategic nuclear weapons deployed. The United States, by contrast, has around 5,900. Yet there is no reason for Ivanov to speak in such dark terms. Both the United States and Russia are parties to the Treaty of Moscow. Pursuant to this agreement signed in 2002, both countries will reduce operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 2,200 by the last day of 2012. Moreover, the Pentagon, especially since 2004, has been reducing the number of strategic nukes below levels required by the Moscow Treaty. The view in Washington is that we do not need all our weapons.
And the truth is that Russia also does not require any more nukes to ensure its security. North Korea, for instance, deterred the United States for years by merely hinting that it possessed an atomic arsenal. Today, it has enough plutonium for a dozen nukes that can be delivered only by pickup truck or cargo container, and it is unlikely to have weaponized all its fissile material. The bomb it tested in October 2006 was a dud, which barely detonated. Yet no one is advocating a military solution to dethrone the thoroughly despicable Kim Jong Il. So, despite the ravings of First Deputy Prime Minister Ivanov, Mother Russia is safe now and it will be safe even if it never approaches parity with the United States.
The Russians are apparently going on a bender, and if their comments make no sense, it is either because they want attention or because historical paranoia is coming to the surface. We know how to deal with nations that act like five year-olds, but we had better figure out the best way to handle the slightly unhinged folks running the Kremlin.
