The Soviet Approach to Nuclear Weapons: A Historical Review

The Soviet approach to nuclear weapons shares very little with the American approach and a great deal with the way the Soviets adopted new military technologies such as aviation and motorization after World War I. Popular Western misperceptions have been reinforced by policy debates in the Soviet press that have been more apparent than real. More compelling evidence is found in the evolution of their military forces and doctrine. This evidence indicates integration of nuclear weapons in a combined-arms approach at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels designed to achieve military objectives, not to maintain deterrence through mutual vulnerability and escalation control. The emergence in the 1980s of a large Soviet force structure to fit their doctrinal view of nuclear war presents the West with a qualitatively new defense problem for the forseeable future.