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Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) 822-823



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Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces. Edited by Pavel Podvig. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Pp. xxi+692. $45.

In the past decade, historians have grown accustomed to revelations from Russian archives covering a wide swath of Soviet political, diplomatic, and military history. That the current Russian government views some of this declassification with great sensitivity is confirmed by the experience of the authors of this thick volume. In 1998, using an array of open sources, several young scientists from the Center for Arms Control Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology published a unique reference work on the former Soviet Union's strategic weapons. In October 1999, the Russian Security Service, believing that the book contained classified information, confiscated all unsold copies along with computers on which the book had been edited. Fortunately, through an agreement with the Security Studies Program at MIT, the book has seen light in the West in a slightly updated English-language version titled Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces.

This is not a narrative history in the traditional sense of the word. Editor Pavel Podvig and his six coauthors instead organize the work around such topics as structure and operations, the production of nuclear weapons, strategic missiles, naval weapons, strategic aviation, air defense and space weapons, and nuclear testing. The stated goal is to provide a resource on all aspects of the nuclear complex. Each section is augmented by tables and diagrams of missiles, submarines, and aircraft.

Much of the history has been published piecemeal in the Russian-language media during the past decade, but it is fascinating to see it all in one place as part of a single story of evolving strategic weapons and technologies. In the late Maxim Tarasenko's chapter on missiles, for example, we learn about the technological choices that fed into the development of the R-7, the world's first successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Its seemingly awkward design, literally strapping five rockets in parallel, was a compromise that imposed significant cost in terms of weight efficiency but allowed all the stages to be fired on the ground. In tracing a tortuous path through several generations of ICBMs, Tarasenko adeptly captures the various [End Page 822] technical innovations that Soviet engineers used to satisfy such requirements as the need for long-term storage, silo launching, hardening silos, and the use of multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs).

Historians of military technology who are unfamiliar with Soviet developments will be surprised to find that Soviet engineers often produced very different solutions to the same problems. For example, in the late 1950s the U.S. Air Force embraced solid propellants as a solution to the long-term storage of ICBMs in a ready mode. Because of "the lack of technology for the production of highly effective and long-lasting solid rocket fuels" (p. 163), the Soviets continued to use liquid propellants well into the 1980s, relying on compensating technologies such as "ampulization," sealing a missile with storable liquid propellants into a container in launch-ready state for several years. (In order to maintain engines in workable condition, they were isolated from the corrosive fuel components by membranes.)

Historians of technology may find the book frustrating because the authors limit their story to compilation rather than analysis (unlike Steven Zalogas's The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword, on the very same topic). One will not, for example, find any insights here into how the development of nuclear submarines fit into the broader history of Soviet nuclear power. Neither do the authors delve into the question of why certain systems were developed rather than others. The so-called little civil war over competing missile systems that engulfed the Soviet missile industry in the late 1960s is described here only "as serious disagreements between . . . two competing teams" (p. 130). But this focus is deliberate, since the authors set out to produce a reference work, not a history book. Given their goals, they have done an exemplary job of peeking into the opaque world of Soviet strategic weapons development. It is...

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