The shift first became evident in 1993, when a new military doctrine reversed a 1982 pledge never to use nuclear weapons first. If an aggressor starts a war against us using conventional weapons, we may respond with nuclear ones. Nuclear weapons are usable under almost any circumstance. On the gloomy side. Although Yeltsin has made it clear he does not believe that NATO poses a direct or immediate military threat, Russia's military planners see the world through a different lens.
Intentions are meaningless, capabilities everything.
In Desert Storm, they saw Western conventional hardware decimate Iraq's Soviet-built arms. At home, they watched poverty and chaos consume Russia's armed forces, shrinking them from 3.4 million in 1991 to 1.3 million last year. Russian military analysts have concluded that the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO will increase its combat potential by 15 to 20 percent, while placing key Russian military facilities within striking range of precision-guided conventional munitions delivered from airfields on the territory of the new NATO members. For now, only about 3,000 of Russia's tactical nuclear weapons remain deployed with operational units, while some 10,000 have been consolidated in secure storage areas. Still, there is a hawkish strain of thinking in Moscow that could prove worrisome under more-nationalist leadership in the Kremlin.