Russia has warned Donald Trump not to resume testing nuclear weapons when he returns to office next year, adding it would ‘not rule anything out’ in response to perceived US aggression.
Sergei Ryabkov, the country’s deputy foreign minister, who oversees arms control, asserted that Trump had taken a radical position on a treaty banning nuclear tests during his first term.
‘The international situation is extremely difficult at the moment. The American policy in its various aspects is extremely hostile to us today,’ Ryabkov was quoted as saying in an interview with Russia’s Kommersant newspaper.
‘So the options for us to act in the interests of ensuring security and the potential measures and actions we have to do this – and to send politically appropriate signals… does not rule anything out.’
During Trump’s first term as president, his administration discussed whether or not to conduct the first U.S. nuclear test since 1992, the Washington Post reported in 2020.
Putin has recently sparked fears the countries could come to nuclear blows, suggesting Russia would consider testing a nuclear weapon if the United States did.
Last month Putin lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, and after Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles.
Russia unleahes its experimental Oreshnik hypersonic missile on Ukraine on November 21
President-elect Donald Trump speaks at AmericaFest, Sunday, December 22
Putin has repeatedly threatened the West with the prospect of nuclear Armageddon over its support for Ukraine.
Tensions reached a new high as Washington greenlit the use of long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia last month.
Soon after, Putin tested an experimental hypersonic missile ‘Oreshnik’ in Dnipro, capable of devastating cities at speeds almost impossible to intercept.
Russia then warned that British support for Ukraine could ‘lead to a collision between nuclear powers’.
Andrey Kelin, Russia’s ambassador to the UK, cited American support for Ukraine to use Western missiles against targets in Russia, backed by Britain and France, in his warning that ‘this seriously escalates the situation’ and ‘can lead to a collision between the nuclear powers’.
Donald Trump said this week, however, that Putin wants a meeting as soon as possible regarding Ukraine to explore avenues to end the war.
Putin suggested he was ready to compromise with Donald Trump, expected to back an offer a more favourable deal to Russia than Biden.
But a path to peace remains uncertain, and voice within and without the United States have raised concerns Trump may look to return to explosive nuclear testing, having signalled he might during the last administration.
Topol-M missile at a Victory Day parade in Moscow, Russia
Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile test-launched from a missile silo at Plesetsk Cosmodrome
The resumption of testing by the world’s two biggest nuclear powers would usher in a new and precarious era nearly 80 years since the United States tested the first nuclear bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945.
A Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) to cease tests was signed by Russia in 1996 and ratified in 2000.
The United States signed the treaty in 1996 but has not ratified it.
In 2023 President Vladimir Putin formally revoked Russia’s ratification of the CTBT, bringing his country into line with the United States.
Now, Russia, the United States and China are all undertaking major modernisations of their nuclear arsenals just as the arms control treaties of the Cold War era between the Soviet Union and the United States crumble.
There are fears among some arms control experts that the United States is moving towards a return to testing as a way to develop new weapons and at the same time send a signal to rivals such as Russia and China.
Russia, with 5,580 warheads, and the United States, with 5,044, are by far the world’s biggest nuclear powers, holding about 88% of the world’s nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists. China has about 500 warheads.
In the five decades between 1945 and the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, over 2,000 nuclear tests were carried out, 1,032 of them by the United States and 715 of them by the Soviet Union, according to the United Nations.
Post-Soviet Russia has not carried out a nuclear test. The Soviet Union last tested in 1990.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, only a few countries have tested nuclear weapons, according to the Arms Control Association: the United States last tested in 1992, China and France in 1996, India and Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2017.