Dimitri Simes is not some unknown pundit on Russian-American affairs speaking off the top of his head. Simes, a Russian-American, was an advisor to Richard Nixon who for decades headed Washington, D.C.’s Center for the National Interest. He now co-hosts the well-watched Great Game political analysis show on Russian TV’s Channel One, and resides in Moscow, after Joe Biden’s FBI raided his U.S. home and put him and his wife on the sanctions list.
Simes raised two sobering questions in a Feb. 10 post on his Telegram account, in response to the article in the New York Times by David Sanger which provided evidence that “Washington is actively considering deploying more nuclear weapons—and it is also likely to conduct a nuclear test of some kind.”
Simes reports that he knows Sanger well, and while he does not always agree with his assessments, “his facts have generally been impeccable.” So he warns that “these assumptions by an authoritative American journalist are already quite alarming. But it is important to understand that behind the facts he presents, there is apparently something even more serious.”
That is, that the Trump administration is interested in abandoning, perhaps even “desires” to abandon, “the postulate of strategic nuclear parity” upon which the two nuclear superpowers have premised their relations since 1969. Any such decision is not likely to change the balance of power, in Simes’s view. “It can only destabilize the strategic situation—and seriously damage relations between the two great powers.”
Russia would have to consider “countermeasures,” should that be the case, Simes notes, before voicing what should worry everyone:
“One would hope that the intention to revise parity is not based on the insane idea of winning a nuclear war. But, at the very least, the goal of creating real opportunities for nuclear blackmail against our country is already obvious. And here Russia has something to think about.”
