January 15, 2000 (New York Times)

MOSCOW, Jan. 14 -- Underscoring its darkening view of the West, the Kremlin issued a national security strategy today that inveighs against an expansionist Europe and United States and contemplates the use of nuclear weapons in war "if all other means of resolving the crisis have been exhausted."

The revised language governing nuclear weapons is a subtle but unmistakable stiffening of the previous strategy, issued in 1997, which allowed the use of nuclear arms only "in case of a threat to the existence of the Russian Federation."

The new strategy was signed by Acting President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday and published today. It reviews not just foreign threats but also a sweeping array of internal dangers, from organized crime to terrorism to separatist movements like that of the militants in Chechnya. Buoyed by the campaign in Chechnya, Mr. Putin is the leading candidate in the election for president on March 26.

In many respects, today's document simply incorporates changes in military and political doctrine approved over the last year as Russia's domestic situation deteriorated and its judgment of Western intentions changed.

The State Department and the Pentagon made no comment today about the announcement. But while the NATO allies do not view Moscow as a source of aggression, allied military commanders still regard its huge nuclear arsenal with wariness and respect.

Taken together, the Russian changes represent a new view of the world by the nation's leaders -- one in which the West is no longer benign, but is a competitor that benefits from and even schemes to ensure Russian weakness.

In the opinion of the document's drafters, Russia is weak in almost every respect.

The strategy calls the armed forces' readiness "critically low", and says social stability is at risk because the population is being stratified into "a thin layer of well-to-do-people and a predominant layer of citizens of scanty means."

It says that terrorism poses a serious internal threat, that foreign economic influence over the economy and natural resources might be more tightly controlled by the state, and that national security is endangered by a brain drain of technologists and the leakage of intellectual property.

The deputy chief of the Russian Defense Ministry's general staff, Col. Valery Manilov, said today that the strategy's apparent suspicion of Western intentions should not be blown out of proportion.

In comments to the Russian news service Interfax, Colonel Manilov said Moscow remained interested in "mutually beneficial and neighborly cooperation on an equal footing with Western countries."

Even that wording reflects the altered sentiment of the strategy, which has dropped all mention of "partnership" with the West in favor of the more neutral term "cooperation."

Little of this bleak picture is new to people who have watched Russia's elite and average citizens alike turn against the West after the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last spring.

Bruce G. Blair, an expert on Russian and American nuclear forces at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the change was "a codification of something that's really already been pretty well cemented in the Russian psyche, at least among their security planners."

And the discussion of nuclear contingencies, which attracted by far the most attention, may not prove to be of much practical significance.

Mr. Putin, who spent a decade or more watching the West as a K.G.B. agent in East Germany, is said by friends to be well aware that any threat that Europe and the United States pose to Russia is not military, but economic and cultural.

And the United States -- which also periodically redraws its security landscape, in an exercise not dissimilar from that of the Kremlin -- has traditionally been more hawkish about the first use of nuclear weapons than has Moscow.

America's policy during the cold war was never to renounce the first use of nuclear arms, but to counter a Russian invasion of Europe with nuclear force, if necessary.

Russia had renounced the first use of nuclear missiles for some years but, worried about China, abandoned the pledge in 1993. By then, however, it viewed itself as an ally of the West.

In that sense, the Kremlin and White House nuclear policies are not all that far apart.

But in terms of security, the Russian and American nuclear forces are now far apart, Mr. Blair said, with American forces remaining under tight control, while control of Russian nuclear missiles is more problematic.