Komsomolskaya Pravda

August 7, 1997

[translation for personal use only]

Denis Baranets report: "$12 Billion for Weapons That No One Has"

More than $12.8 billion has been allocated for funding our programs for the creation of new types of weapons this year (the entire military budget amounts to $19 billion). This figure was made public for the first time in conversation with your Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent by a spokesman for the Rosvooruzheniye publicly owned company who did not wish to give his name. Into what has the public money been thrown?

Major General Slipchenko, the recent director of the Research Department of the General Staff, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that such classes of arms as directed energy weapons, automatic precision weapons, deep-penetration munitions, and equipment for conducting so-called electronic warfare are being created at this time.

Andrey Kokoshin, first deputy minister of defense, boasted in an interview that the program of military development up to the year 2005 would provide Russia with "weapons that have no counterparts in the world." It is for this that the 1,700 research centers of Russia"s military-industrial complex are working.

Komsomolskaya Pravda has managed, however, to ascertain some of our military secrets. The present high-priority strategic programs, according to Rosvooruzheniye information, include: Topol-M2 mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (an upgraded version of the SS-25 missile, which was put into mass production at the end of last year); a new tactical nuclear arms system capable under combat conditions of firing nuclear warheads over a distance of 400 kilometers (the system was tested successfully at the end of 1995); ultra-small nuclear warheads weighing less than 90 kilograms, which are already being manufactured; seven Borey-class submarines armed with the D-31 new ballistic missiles.

In addition, Russia's military laboratories are developing laser and radio-frequency weapons.

---------------------

Johnson's Russia List

#1122

14 August 1997

djohnson@cdi.org