Putin's Nuclear Viagra: Russia states the obvious

My favorite coverage of the Russian announcement that Time Man of the Year [oops, wrong picture] Vladimir Putin's government is willing to use nuclear weapons if it gets scared is from the Xinhua News Agency: Army chief: Russia may use nuclear weapons if necessary.

The announcement was made by Russian Armed Forces' Chief of the General Staff Yuri Baluyevsky:

"We do not intend to attack anybody. But all our partners must realize that for protection of Russia and its allies if necessary armed forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons," Baluyevsky was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying at a scientific conference of the Academy of Military Sciences.

With the emergence of new threats to security, Russia needs to update a number of provisions in the existing National Security Concept, Baluyevsky said.


"As life is ever-changing, it has become necessary today to update certain provisions of the concept and, what is the most important, to turn these provisions into a working mechanism for protecting our national security," he said.

Baluyevsky's speech came a day after Georgia announced some 77 percent of the Georgian population voted for joining NATO in a recent referendum.

Georgia's possible entry into NATO will seriously change the regional geostrategic situation, Nikolai Bordyuzha, general secretary of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), said on Friday.

"Georgia's membership in NATO means that the military infrastructure of the alliance will advance closer to the CSTO borders and that there will be higher military activity directly outside the external borders of the organization's zone of responsibility," he said.

"This will in itself inevitably provoke stronger instability and unpredictability that will jeopardize the CSTO's zone of responsibility," Bordyuzha said.

The seven-member CSTO was renamed in October 2002 on the basis of the Collective Security Treaty (CST), which was signed in Mary 1992 within the framework of the commonwealth of Independent States. The current members of the CSTO include Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Russia and Uzbekistan.

This is nothing new, either for Putin or Baluyevsky, who issued similar stern warnings about possible missile defense shields being employed in Europe four years ago:

Speaking to a gathering of foreign military attaches in Moscow, Yuri Baluyevsky said: "The creation of a U.S. anti-missile base cannot be viewed otherwise than as a major reconfiguration of the American military presence. Vanguard groupings of the U.S. armed forces in Europe have until now had no strategic components. This raises the question as to who U.S. anti-missile plans are really targeted against, and what kind of implications they may have for Russia and Europe at large."

He dismissed assurances that the base's buildup will have no noticeable effect on Russia's nuclear deterrent potential.

"An ABM area near Europe's Russian borders is an unfriendly step, to put it mildly, and an unfriendly signal," he said. "The potential interception zone for ballistic missiles from this area will span much of Russia's European territory."

"Given that its [the shield's] creation may prompt other countries to step up their activities in missile building, the situation in the longer term appears all the more alarming. It is clearly fraught with the potential for a nuclear arms race, which will have a negative impact on global strategic stability."

"It will force us to look for certain counter-measures, which will definitely be asymmetrical and less expensive," Baluyevsky said.

He also expressed concern over the potential damage that may be caused to Russia's environment by the nuclear warheads of missiles shot down over Russian soil.

While this is a pretty traditional Russian response to feeling surrounded (read Soviet military strategy articles between 1945-1985 if you want to see what I mean), we exist today in a far less stable world than existed in the good old days of the Cold War, when we could be sure that the old Russians running the USSR really wanted to retire to their dachas and enjoy their mistresses rather than incinerate the world.

And the United States, having lived under the Bush doctrine now for seven years, has absolutely no room to chide the Russians for publicly announcing exactly the same policy.