So, before you casually dismiss the possibility that Golitsyn was, and is, being proved right.... we need to see how the continued modernization of the Russian nuclear military can be explained...in spite of a supposedly crushing economic collapse. The Russian navy was indeed allowed to lapse into rust...but that would be just the kind of gesture Golitsyn suggested would put us off our guard. They always were a land power. Having a huge navy was extremely threatening. But meanwhile the strategic rocket corps was modernized and made SDI-proof. Specifically, they have refined and continue to improve their national anti-missile defenses, the SAM-300/400s...and associated radar systems such as Krasnyorsk. And deploy the Topol-M, a missile that apparently eclipses our own vaunted MX, with equal accuracy, and the capability of just as many warheads, and superior mobility. It is essentially an off-road-mobile. Our MX never got out of the equivalent of vulnerable Minuteman silos. The Topol-M also featured three key capacities that permit them to boast of defeating SDI:
(1) MARV or MAneuverable Re-entry Vehicles. This would allow for them to essentially frustrate any hit-to-kill technology now in the offing. In plain language, they can dodge and duck the defense.
(2) FOBS or Fractional Orbital Bombardment System. The range of this missile is so great that it can literally hurl its payload around the world the long way around, and come at a target such as the U.S. by coming around from the other side, i.e., a South Polar vector. Assuming our space-based assets had already been targetted by either ASATS or EMP weapons (say from a proxy-state such as North Korea) we could easily be vulnerable to this kind of attack...even assuming we went back to a launch-on-warning posture. This is because a FOBS attack evades our northerly-oriented BMEWS or (formerly DEWS) radar picket detections of their launches, and catches us unawares. The Topol-M features guidance CEP in the same ballpark as our own MX, and hence could conceivably succeed in a first strike against our hardened land-based assets. And of course, in port submarines and bombers, caught off-guard are just toast.
(3) Stealth. They apparently have developed a plasma 'sheath' which their Topol-M's RVs can deploy to render them radar invisible. This would accentuate the difficulty at either detecting the attack in time, or doing any tracking for any hypothetical SDI intercept capability.
The question then occurs, with their continued (and rather blatant, in-your-face, post Moscow 'disarmament treaty') retention of their massive SS-18 force, and their dogged persistence in developing and deployment...currently... this first-strike weapons system....why? If they are our buddies, or just economic rivals, why this collossal investment in a 'destabilizing' system? This persistence continues in the face of (a) our interim failures to deploy any robust NMD or SDI, and (b) our extreme-trust shift away from launch-on-warning and survivable C4I with Operation Looking Glass, almost a complete stand-down, witho a no-launch-on-warning (take the hit) retaliatory policy, (c) our imnmediate retirement plans for the whole of the MX force (d) the degraded performence demonstrated by the Clinton-Upgraded Minuteman-IIIs. The list goes on.
Now PsyOp could well be right, and a dissimulation campaign 'got away' from the Kremlin. This hypothesis would allow him to admit that the phony 'putsch' against Gorbachev and the fleeing of the alleged perpetrators to Spain was in fact intended to implement part of such a deception campaign. But, the strategic rocket corps is still in the hands of the communist hard-liners. Just when does that part of their scheme (actual control of the main weapons, as their doctrine called the land-based mega missiles) get out of their (presumably FSB/KGB-directed) control? And just when do the Communists get out of the Duma? And just what precisely would prevent reactionaries who were in on the scheme before from re-taking the reigns of power and implementing the designs if it looked like we did in fact disarm enough to make it work????
And btw, on a touching side note, despite the allusions to the Buran 'restaurant'...Putin did plan on resurrecting Buran...