Was there debate in Soviet government or society about the development of nuclear weapons? If so, what did this look like?

by ApocSurvivor713

Posters like this, this, and this are frequently propagated as government propaganda from the Soviet era. I'm not sure when these posters were made originally, or I'd be more specific on the dates. They clearly promote an anti-nuclear-war agenda, and yet while I can't find specific info with a quick search, the Soviet Union seems to have been building its nuclear arsenal and researching new nuclear weapons developments all through the Cold War. Were these made by the government? If so, were there internal disputes over the use of nuclear weapons? Or were they made by groups of civilians (was this even a thing in the USSR?), and if so, what was the government approach to dealing with this?

restricteddata

So all of those posters are from the 1980s, which is sort of the heyday of anti-nuclear Soviet propaganda. They were from a time in which the Soviet arsenal was huge, as was the American arsenal. The Soviet anti-nuclear propaganda of the 1980s was always very carefully tuned to be against the arms race and nuclear war in general, which was blamed on the United States. The posters were not part of an internal criticism of the Soviet arms development, which was always presented as purely defensive in the face of American imperialism and aggression (after all, the US made the bomb first, was the only nation to use it in war, had threatened to use it against the USSR and China several times, etc. etc.). This took place at the same time that there were massive anti-nuclear weapons movements in the United States and Western Europe. In Western Europe they were also associated with the fact that US nuclear weapons were based in allied countries, like West Germany — something the USSR deeply resented and feared. (And remember what happened when the USSR had tried to put nukes in an allied country near the US, with Cuba.)

There were, by the 1980s, dissidents within the USSR who voiced anti-Soviet and anti-nuclear views (like Andrei Sakharov, a former nuclear weapons developer), and during glasnost some of these views were permitted a wider airing. It is not clear to me that one could characterize this as a mass anti-nuclear movement in the USSR, in the same way that one could in the US and Western Europe. But these posters are attempts to simultaneously support these external movements, while at the same time fastidiously avoiding the somewhat obvious implication that the Soviet Union, as the other great nuclear power of the world, was complicit in these developments. In practice, Gorbachev would attempt to enact severe nuclear cutbacks and even offer total nuclear disarmament up as a possibility when talking to Reagan at Reykjavik, making these posters less "words without action" than one might expect (or that Soviet critics might criticize them as being).