Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 7 – Over the
last week, the editors of Moscow’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta” point out in an
editorial today, the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces have conducted “two
large-scale exercises which in essence reject the well-known thesis that in a
nuclear war, there cannot be a victor.”
And that suggests, as the editors
put it in the headline of their article, “Russia is preparing for victory in a
nuclear war,” a shift that is undoubtedly intended in the first instance to
intimidate the West but that represents a dangerous escalation of rhetoric and
action in an unstable time (ng.ru/editorial/2015-09-07/2_red.html).
These exercises strongly suggest, “Nezavisimaya
gazeta” says that Russian commanders no longer view an exchange of weapons of
mass destruction “as the inevitable end of humanity.” And they add: “if that is so, then [the Russian
military and Russian political leadership] should tell us that directly.”
Both the
size of the exercises – they covered some 20 Russian regions – and their focus –
practicing the decontamination of locales hit by chemical, bacteriological and
nuclear weapons – suggest, the editors continue, that Russia’s Strategic Rocket
Forces are thinking about fighting and winning a nuclear war.
After describing the various units involved and the
actions they took, the editors conclude that “in other words, the scenario
developed in the maneuvers shows that Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces are
preparing to carry out military tasks after an attack by an opponent on our country”
involving the use of “nuclear weapons.”
“More than that, they write, what
the Russian military is practicing is to launch a counter strike even after
such an attack, an action which in the past has been called “’a shot from the
grave’” and that many analysts have suggested is an important part of
deterrence against a first strike by suggesting that no first attack could
prevent a response.
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