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NPS NRP Executive Summary ; Project Summary: This project examined limited nuclear conflict and escalation control in the policies of Russia and NATO. Russia has repeatedly reformulated its military doctrine in conjunction with ambitious nuclear force modernization and the pursuit of advanced non-nuclear capabilities. While the 29 NATO Allies have agreed policies regarding nuclear deterrence, ultimate control over nuclear weapons in the Alliance resides with Britain, France, and the United States. Since the year 2000, three iterations of the Russian military doctrine have contained clauses permitting Russia to use nuclear arms against an enemy that might, using conventional capabilities alone, put the Russian state at the verge of collapse. The Russian plans for nuclear first use have focused on using non- strategic nuclear weapons (NSNW) for escalation: beginning with threats, then moving on to single demonstration strikes, and gradually up to massive attacks against enemy forces in the theater of military operations. The NATO Allies have for many years expressed interest in escalation control and restoring deterrence in the event of conflict, notably in the 1967 MC 14/3 "flexible response" strategy. After the end of the Cold War in 1989-1991 the Allies neglected escalation control. However, Russia's actions, notably in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, have led the Allies to reconsider the challenges of escalation control. ; N3/N5 ; NPS-18-N251-A ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Russia has sharply objected to US plans for ballistic missile defense. The Russian official explanation is that the real purpose of the US missile defense plan is to make it impossible for Russia to retaliate against a US nuclear (or massive conventional) attack, thus making Russia subject to military blackmail by the US. The Russian response has been the result of a sum total of various factors, mostly political and cultural, while the technical capabilities of the proposed system have played a secondary role.

Earlier this month, Rusian President Dmitri Medvedev signed the new "Military Doctrine of the Russian Federatin until 2020" to replace the doctrine signed by Vladimir Putin in 2000. It's supposed to be a guiding document for the development of the armed forces. Western observers have focused on two aspects of the new doctrine emphasized by its drafters: the designation of NATO as a source of military danger, and the language on nuclear deterrence. Upon closer inspection, however, there is nothing new in the document on either subject. The really interesting aspects of the new doctrine are the contradictions between its text and Russia's ongoing military reform, as well as those between the envisioned requirements for future weapons acquisition and the realities of Russia's defense industry.

American policy-makers continue to struggle with Russia's intensely negative reaction to the proposed ballistic missile defence (BMD) deployments in Central Europe. As Russian president, Vladimir Putin denounced the plans for missile defence put forward by US president George W. Bush. Putin's successor, Dmitry Medvedev, greeted the election of Barack Obama by threatening to target the proposed BMD facility in Poland with new missiles. All American assurances that the proposed deployment is a limited one, designed for defence against Iran, appear to have been wasted on the Russians.

The gestation period for the Russian draft Treaty of European Security was unusually long. Newly elected Dmitry Medvedev announced on May 8, 2008, that he was going to come up with a new plan for European security, and the draft treaty was only published on November 30, 2009.the invitation to alliances and international organizations to become signatories has two objectives. One is to strengthen the legitimacy of the weak organizations founded and supported by Russia (the CIS (Commonwealth of Indepedent States) and CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization). The other goal is to dilute somewhat the collective security obligations of NATO members. According to the draft treaty, the policies of existing "military alliances" are not supposed to impact negatively the security of other parties. It is not clear at all how the approval of the treaty by alliances/organization would affect the relationships of their members vis-a-vis the treaty.

Such aspects of the proclaimed new Soviet military doctrine as 'reasonable sufficiency' and 'defensive strategy' are receiving considerable attention from Western observers. At the same time, relatively less attention is being paid to another facet of this doctrine: the transition from quantity to quality in providing for the defense needs of the Soviet Union, announced by Mikhail Gorbachev at the 19th Communist Party Conference in June 1988. From now on, the Soviet leader stated, the security of the USSR would rely not on quantitative factors, but on high quality of military manpower, military hardware and military science.

Russian Minister of Defense Marshal Igor Sergeyev has proposed merging the Strategic Rocket Forces and strategic nuclear components of the Navy and Air Force. Advocates of the proposed reform invoke Russia's need to increase its reliance on nuclear weapons in view of the decline in its conventional forces, as well as the potential savings from the merger. Critics of the plan view it as favoring the Strategic Rocket Forces at the expense of the rest of the military, and as prohibitively expensive. The NATO campaign in Kosovo has made Marshal Sergeyev vulnerable to criticism for emphasizing nuclear forces over conventional ones, and the plan has been put on hold.

Abstract: The origins of today's Russian intelligence services suggest that their transition to real democratic civilian control—which has yet to happen—is likely to be anything but easy. While the last months of the Soviet Union's existence saw the splitting of the KGB into several agencies, there has been no basic change in either the personnel of the state-security establishment or the its broad scope of responsibilities. Nothing about the underlying situation will change until the Russian people face the malign role that spies and secret police responsible only to some supreme leader have played in their country's history.