The troubled history of the Russian Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missile program is a textbook example of the problems that can plague an ambitious weapons program -- and how they can be overcome.

As respected Russian military analyst Nikita Petrov wrote for RIA Novosti two months ago, "Russia's navy pins great hopes on the Bulava, which has been plagued by problems for 15 years. The missile is also the focus of intrigue, with some designers wishing it good luck and others good riddance."

In building the Bulava, Russia's top Defense Ministry experts made the same kind of mistake to which the U.S. Department of Defense has been prone. They gave a major military engineering job to a large, well-established and respected organization that had a first-class track record but little or no experience in the actual field it was now being asked to master.

As Petrov pointed out, the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology -- also referred to as the Moscow Institute of Heat Engineering -- had never built submarine-launched ballistic missiles before for the Russian navy.

The MITT got the job after the Makeyev Design Bureau in the city of Miass, which specialized in designing submarine-launched ballistic missiles, produced its own prototype Bark SLBM that failed in three out of three test launches. The job of designing a new long-range SLBM that could be fired from Russia's ambitious new Borey-class Project 955 submarines therefore was handed over to the MITT, which had just produced a winner in the mobile, land-based, single-warhead Topol-M. But the MITT solution proved to be a bigger headache than the previous unsuccessful project it was designed to replace.

Major weapons systems do not grow on trees. A vast amount of engineering know-how and experience, on the individual and institutional levels, is required to design and then develop such ambitious engineering projects. The MITT engineers were not used to working with salt water, and they quickly found that "virtual" solutions that worked wonderfully on computer screens and in software programs were a lot more difficult to deal with when they were turned into enormous steel missiles with solid fuel-powered engines that had to be launched below the surface of the sea through salt water. Again and again, the new Bulavas emerged from the ocean at awkward angles, wrecking the accuracy of their ballistic flight trajectory.

As Petrov noted, "Sea water is 800 times denser than air and always has been a challenge to a missile launched from a running submarine."

Weapons systems can appear "brilliantly" conceptualized and invulnerable in their computer screen simulations. But they still have to cope with the unforgiving realities the elements express through the relentless laws of chemistry and physics.

Weapons systems ultimately also have to be built by lots of human beings -- specially trained, experienced and skilled ones. And such expertise is usually never available in the numbers and reliability that is required. That was another problem the Russian industrial plants discovered when they worked on building the Bulava-M SLBM prototypes.

(Part 2: Learning to live with test failures)