Russia will not test a nuclear weapon as long as the United States refrains from testing, President Vladimir Putin’s point man for arms control said on Monday after speculation that the Kremlin might abandon its post-Soviet nuclear test moratorium.
As the United States and its European allies consider giving Ukraine permission to strike deep into Russia with Western missiles, there has been increasing talk that Russia could resume nuclear testing.
Russian state-run newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta last week published an interview with Andrei Sinitsyn, head of Russia’s nuclear test site at Novaya Zemlya, saying the site is ready for resumption of full-scale testing.
Putin, the ultimate decision-maker for the world’s biggest nuclear power, has linked any resumption of Russian nuclear testing to similar such moves by the United States, and has said he has no need to use such weapons to win the war in Ukraine.
“Nothing has changed,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who is in charge of Russian arms control policy, told Russian news agencies about the speculation that a nuclear test could be Russia’s answer to missile strikes deep into Russia.
“As defined and formulated by the president of the Russian Federation, we can conduct such tests, but we will not conduct them if the United States refrains from such steps.”
Ryabkov said preparations at Russia’s Novaya Zemlya nuclear test site to make it “fully ready” were undertaken in response to actions by the United States which he said had improved its own testing infrastructure.
Russia, the United States and China have all built new facilities and dug new tunnels at their nuclear test sites in recent years, CNN reported in 2023.
Post-Soviet Russia has not carried out a nuclear test. The Soviet Union last tested in 1990, and the United States in 1992. No country except North Korea has conducted a test involving a nuclear explosion in this century.
Ryabkov said Moscow was alarmed at reports that the United States had no immediate plans to withdraw a mid-range missile system deployed in the Philippines. Russia, he said, was considering its response – including in the military sphere.
The 2-1/2-year-old Ukraine war has caused the worst confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – which is considered to be the time when the two Cold War superpowers came closest to intentional nuclear war.
After the Cuban crisis, then-US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev explored the idea of a ban on nuclear testing.
In 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally revoked Russia’s ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), bringing Russia into line with the United States.
The resumption of testing would usher in a new and precarious nuclear era just as Russia, the United States and China race to modernise their nuclear weapons.
Washington casts Russia and China as its biggest nation-state threats. Beijing and Moscow, which have deepened their partnership during the Ukraine war, casts the United States as a declining superpower that has sown chaos across the world.
The Soviet Union shocked the West by testing its first nuclear bomb in 1949 in Kazakhstan. The US opened the nuclear era in July 1945 by testing a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, then dropped atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a month later to end World War II.
For many scientists and campaigners, the extent of nuclear bomb testing during the Cold War indicated the folly of nuclear brinkmanship, which could ultimately destroy humanity and contaminate the planet for hundreds of thousands of years.