CNSNews.com, Moscow (CNSNews.com) – Russia's Strategic Forces plan to hold their largest maneuvers in two decades, reportedly a simulation of a full-scale nuclear conflict.
Although officially presented as an anti-terrorism exercise, the one-day war games will involve the test-firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), deployment of strategic bombes, and the firing of a missile from a nuclear submarine, according to Russian media reports.
Russia's Kommersant daily reports that the exercise, set for mid-February, could approximate Soviet-era war games back in 1982, which were dubbed the “seven-hour nuclear war.”
Tupolev-160 Blackjack long-range strategic bombers (Tu-160s) will test-fire cruise missiles over the northern Atlantic, in Russia's Arctic regions and near the Caspian Sea, reports said.
A missile defense system protecting Moscow will be tested, and military satellites will be launched, in a simulation of the replacement of satellites lost in action.
In mid-January, Tu-160s flew again for the first time since the entire fleet was grounded after a crash last fall. The supersonic planes are designed to strike distant targets with up to 12 missiles each.
The Defense Ministry confirmed that military exercises are planned for February but has not released details.
Russian Strategic Missile Forces head Nikolai Solovtsov told the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily that a total of ten “test-combat” missile launches were planned for 2004, but did not say how many of these would form part of the February war games.
Russia must notify the United States 24 hours before a missile test, and has done so in the past.
The planned maneuvers are the latest in a series of recent moves designed to exhibit Russia's strategic deterrent.
Last December, a fourth regiment of Topol-M ICBMs was put on combat duty in Tatischevo, Central Russia.
The Topol-M has been described as the cornerstone of Russia's missile-nuclear shield. The single-warhead missile (which NATO has codenamed SS-X-27), can be fired from a silo or mobile launcher.
Topol-M mobile missiles are eventually to replace 270 silo-based missile complexes, according to Solovtsov.
Russia has also placed dozens of previously stored multi-warhead SS-19 ICBMs on “combat duty.”
Last October, President Vladimir Putin said Russia possessed SS-19s that had been stored without fuel and had never previously deployed, and thus were not part of disarmament negotiations.
When the strategic arms reduction treaty START-I was signed in 1991, the Soviet Union had a total of 300 SS-19 missiles.
According to the START-II treaty, Russia was to dismantle all ground-based ICBMs with multiple warheads.
Under the treaty provisions, a total of 105 of the missiles may be retained, provided
they are downgraded to carry only one warhead each, instead of six.
In May 2002, Putin and President Bush signed the Moscow Treaty, requiring the two countries to cut the number of warheads on combat duty to between 1,700 and 2,200 a side.
It allows both countries to store, rather than dismantle the warheads.
Russia now has a total of just over 700 ICBMs (missiles with a range of greater than 5,500 kilometers) armed with around 3,100 nuclear warheads, according to local reports and think tanks. Those are apart from nuclear missiles launched by submarines or bombers.
Whatever the foreign policy agenda behind the February war games, they are also regarded here as having a domestic rationale, likely to boost Putin's popularity shortly before he stands for re-election on March 14.
According to the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, the Bush administration, like its predecessor, “has not made an issue of Russia's sporadic but continued modernization of its strategic nuclear missiles and its annual practice drills to attack the United States.”
It had also not made legislative changes to ensure that U.S. disarmament aid was not used to aid Moscow's nuclear missile modernization, nor had it “linked Russia's debt relief and economic recovery to its nuclear modernization,” the Center said Tuesday.
