MOSCOW, May 15. /TASS/. Russia's newly-appointed Defense Minister Andrey Belousov should first of all pay attention to the future of the nuclear forces and their transformation, military analyst Igor Korotchenko has said in a column written for TASS.

"What should the newly-appointed head of the Russian Defense Ministry pay attention to first thing? The future of Russia's strategic nuclear forces and how they may be transformed in the context of the growing role and importance in the United States of conventional high accuracy weapons, which form the basis of its ‘prompt global strike’ concept," said Korotchenko, the editor-in-chief of National Defense magazine.

"It is fundamentally important for Russia to ensure the invulnerability of its strategic nuclear forces, at least, of the retaliatory strike group. In case of a first nuclear missile strike against Russia we should be able to destroy the aggressor with a retaliatory strike in a guaranteed manner. This formula makes us secure against World War III," Korotchenko said.

He added that in this regard there was a fundamental question of starting serial production and adopting for service the Barguzin combat railroad missile systems.

"The current location of such systems in combat positions between Moscow and Vladivostok cannot be detected by the enemy's space reconnaissance. Hence their invulnerability," Korotchenko said.

The development of the Barguzin combat railroad missile system began in 2013 on orders from President Vladimir Putin at the Moscow Institute of Thermal Engineering (MIT). The original plan was such trains would be created for the Strategic Missile Forces. However, in 2017, the project was not included in the new government program for armaments due to financial constraints. The project was mothballed. The MIT's general designer, Yury Solomonov, told TASS in an interview in 2020 his center was ready to resume research into the project.