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Russia has a rich bureaucratic tradition: When a project fails miserably, the people most responsible get off scot-free, while others — often the most honest and conscientious — get stuck with the blame and suffer the consequences. After the latest unsuccessful test launch of the Navy’s new Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile, Yury Solomonov, the program’s chief engineer and general director of the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, submitted his resignation. Of course, Solomonov carries some responsibility for the failure, but there are others who are clearly much more at fault.

Perhaps Solomonov’s biggest mistake was when he agreed 11 years ago to take on a near-impossible project. In 1998, then-Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev canceled the giant Bark naval missile project, designed by the Miass Construction Bureau in the Chelyabinsk region, following three unsuccessful test launches. It its place, he handed over the task of building new naval intercontinental missiles to the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology under Solomonov’s leadership. Solomonov was director of the institute when it had just finalized the design of the Topol-M land-based intercontinental ballistic missile and found itself in a crisis without any more weapons orders. Sergeyev justified his decision by saying the Bulava would be produced on the basis of Topol-M technology and would ultimately become the prototype for the design of both land- and sea-based missiles.

The Bulava fiasco is much more an issue of management negligence and incompetence than it is a technological failure. It is the government that spends gigantic sums on these projects, and therefore it carries the most responsibility for managing the project — performing evaluations, making the correct decisions and providing competent oversight. Sergeyev is not only a marshal, but he is also a doctor of engineering — exactly the combination of skills that could provide such oversight. Recall how, in the midst of the turbulent 1990s, he painstakingly produced the Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile — the first ground-based missile to be built using only Russian parts — thereby ensuring that under any circumstances Russia would remain a nuclear power to be reckoned with for at least the next 30 years.

Sergeyev was succeeded as defense minister by current Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, who is remembered for placing a collar that reportedly was equipped with a Glonass satellite navigation device on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s pet Labrador, Koni. Ivanov went on to ruin two major projects — Glonass and the Bulava missile — in large part because of his poor managerial skills. As it turned out, Ivanov was not in the same class as Dmitry Ustinov or Boris Vannikov, who served as Josef Stalin’s chief armaments tsars. Apparently, Ivanov’s professional background as Putin’s KGB comrade in Leningrad was not sufficient to successfully manage a new, complicated high-tech missile project.

The Bulava missile utilizes components manufactured by 650 different suppliers. This requires an extremely complex process of coordination that, unfortunately, cannot be regulated with the help of a free market. The problem is that there is no profit to be made from the manufacturing of such products in the modern Russian economy. The Soviet Union could afford the luxury of having companies that produced only a handful of components every year, but these enterprises have either shut their doors or switched to producing other things now. Solomonov, whom officials have made into a scapegoat, had warned the authorities for years that Russia is losing many of its technological advantages and that nobody in the government was able to create a mechanism that would make the remaining technologies commercially viable.

According to some media reports, Russia’s secret services are focusing on finding the saboteurs who allegedly slipped defective parts into the Bulava manufacturing process. But this is nonsense, of course.

The most important aspect of the problem involves the decision to rush the Bulava’s production over the past 10 years. This has been the single most negative factor affecting the project’s final outcome. Everybody understood that the Bulava had to be deployed quickly. The service periods of the increasingly obsolete land-based missiles they were intended to replace had already been extended three or four times, and they would soon have to be decommissioned in massive numbers.

The most logical question to ask is “What was the point of developing the Bulava in the first place?” When Soviet nuclear and missile scientists Igor Kurchatov, Sergei Korolyov, Yuly Khariton and their colleagues started to build the country’s nuclear missile arsenal in the 1950s, they at least believed that they were saving the Soviet Union from an inevitable nuclear attack by the United States. According to the dominant Soviet military theory, U.S. nuclear  superiority over the Soviet Union in terms of warheads and delivery systems would pose a direct threat of a surprise U.S. nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.

In reality, of course, this was an absurd theory then — and even more absurd today. We should keep in mind that those insidious Yankees not only timed the removal of some of their nuclear weapons from active service to coincide with Russia’s decommissioning of its obsolete and inoperative nuclear weapons, but they have also spent a billion dollars annually helping Russia to maintain the safety of its nuclear arsenal.

Why do we continue to slave at any cost to  maintain a semblance of nuclear parity with the United States? It is obviously not because Russia wants to ensure national security. The impossibility of an attack against Russia can be guaranteed with a far smaller number of nuclear weapons than we now possess.

We need to be honest with ourselves and admit that the rush over the Bulava missile is driven by the psychological need to deploy a modern weapon that will allow Moscow to feel on par with Washington. In addition, the Bulava, Topol-M and a heavy arsenal of delivery vehicles and warheads make it possible to make nuclear parity the main question in U.S.-Russian negotiations.

But is the goal of developing and maintaining a nuclear arsenal equal to the United States’ worth the huge cost? During an economic crisis, is it wise to pour so much of the state’s energy and resources into funding the unrealistic ambitions of President Dmitry Medvedev and Putin that provide a palliative against their chronic inferiority complex?

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.