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In his Prague speech on Sunday, U.S. President Barack Obama reinforced his vision of reducing the number of nuclear weapons held by the United States, Russia and the other members of the "nuclear club." He also said one of his goals is to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the planet.
On the same day, North Korea launched a Taepodong-2 missile that crossed over Japanese airspace before falling into the Pacific Ocean. It became clear to everyone how dangerous it is for a rogue state to possess both a nuclear device and missiles.
These two events on Sunday should also have cleared up a few things for Russia's military leaders. As Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has been trying to implement military reforms, the top brass have argued that no structural changes should be made to the organization of the armed forces until the military doctrine -- the fundamental security document that specifically spells out which military threats Russia is facing -- has been finalized. After North Korea's missile launch, the situation should be crystal clear.
We now have a country on Russia's southeastern border that possesses a missile capable of flying over the Ural Mountains. What's more, Pyongyang ignores protests from members of the United Nations Security Council, including Russia.
Why does the Kremlin need to create an imaginary threat out of NATO and the United States when it has a very real threat from North Korea, which is located only several hundred kilometers away from Vladivostok? Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has always had a fondness for quoting 19th-century German leader Otto von Bismarck: "It's more important to assess a country's military potential than its intentions." Perhaps Putin should take a closer look at Pyongyang's potential.
The North Korean missile test has shown that a significant part of Russian territory is absolutely defenseless against Pyongyang. True, Russian air defense spokesmen confidently asserted that Russian radar-tracking equipment had followed the missile's trajectory and that S-300 surface-to-air systems were prepared to shoot it down had it flown toward Russian territory. In reality, though, the radar station can only track separate segments of a North Korean missile's flight trajectory. The problem is that the station was built during the Soviet era, when nobody imagined that North Korea might one day represent a serious threat. And since the S-300 has a range of only 120 kilometers and can reach an altitude of only 30 kilometers, the North Korean missile would have to fly directly over one of Russia's missile defense installations to have any chance of being intercepted.
For the last seven years, Moscow has protested U.S. plans to develop a global missile defense system because the Kremlin believes that Washington will gain a strategic advantage over Moscow. But a global missile defense system -- despite all of its imperfections -- is the only reasonable response to a rogue state armed with nuclear missiles. The reason is that the usual approach to nuclear containment simply does not work when applied to states like North Korea.
Restraining their nuclear programs by threatening a retaliatory strike might not have the desired effect because the leaders of such states do not particularly care whether their citizens live or die. Their policy is to blackmail their immediate neighbors and the entire world. If Russia were to make an impartial assessment of existing threats, it would have no choice but to either significantly beef up its own missile defense system or somehow link up with the U.S. system.
Because Russia's conventional forces are so weak, the Kremlin relies heavily on its nuclear arms for national security. The country's nuclear arsenal is the only military component that gives it weight in dealing with the United States and China. This is precisely why Russia's military strategists see Obama's call for a decrease in nuclear weapons as another attempt to decrease Moscow's influence. They fear that once Russia's nuclear arsenal becomes equal to that of China, Britain and France, Moscow will end up on the sidelines of global affairs.
This is precisely why Russia spends 100 billion rubles ($3 billion) every year to maintain its nuclear arsenal rather than using that money to defend itself from North Korea.
Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.
