The Russian federal budget is characterised by a high degree of non-transparency in relation to spending on defence and security. This particularly applies to the procurement of armaments and spending on the individual services of the armed forces. The funding of nuclear weapons is no exception. The available evidence is fragmentary and a considerable degree of estimation is required to obtain an overall total for spending on Russia's nuclear triad. For Russian specialists, this is a highly sensitive topic and the author is not aware of any published attempt to undertake this exercise within the country. Given the lack of transparency, the author has had no choice but to resort to the 'Sovietological' methods often necessary in the past to estimate economic data relating to the USSR – though this is a methodological issue, rather than a suggestion or foundation that Russia is “returning” to the USSR. Before looking at the available data, it is necessary to examine the institutional structures for nuclear munitions and their delivery systems and then analyse the treatment of expenditure on these structures and how it is handled in the chapters and subchapters of the federal budget.
Julian Cooper is based at the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Birmingham and an Associate Senior Fellow at SIPRI. This paper was originally commissioned by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as part of a project investigating the funding of nuclear weapons in countries which possess them.
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