According to RIA Novosti, Defense Secretary Serdyukov told Russian journalists in Washington Friday that, if the next Bulava launches fail for different reasons, Russia will have to change its system of production and quality control.
Serdyukov said, if the missiles fail for the same reason, the cause of the failures will be found. But if the causes turn out to be different, we “have to change the entire production and quality control system for these missiles.”
According to ITAR-TASS, Serdyukov said:
“In the assembly of these missiles we tried to make them fully identical so that they would be like twins [triplets?].”
“We can’t hurry the testing. The main thing is that in every assembly cycle there were strict guarantees that we made the missiles absolutely identically and all procedures were followed.”
“The possible defects will be the same, then we will eliminate them, but if they are different, then we have to break down the entire system and find out what is happening in production and quality control. Then it will be clear that the production monitoring is incorrect and it’s absolutely necessary to change it.”
Russian Defense Policy 