MOSCOW (Reuters) –On Friday, Russia’s point man for arms control warned Donald Trump’s incoming administration against resuming nuclear testing, saying Moscow would keep its options open despite Washington’s “extremely hostile” stance.
The resumption of testing by the world’s two largest nuclear powers would usher in a new and dangerous era, nearly 80 years after the United States tested the first nuclear bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945.
Russia, the United States, and China are all modernizing their nuclear arsenals at the same time that Cold War-era arms control treaties between the Soviet Union and the United States are crumbling.
In an explicit message to Washington, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who oversees arms control, stated that Trump had taken a radical stance on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) during his first term.
“The international situation is extremely difficult at the moment, and American policy in its various aspects is extremely hostile to us today,” Ryabkov told 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 from 2017 to 2021, his administration debated whether to conduct the first nuclear test in the United States since 1992, according to the Washington Post in 2020.
In 2023, President Vladimir Putin formally revoked Russia’s ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), aligning his country with the United States.
Russia signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996, which was ratified in 2000. The United States signed the treaty in 1996, but has yet to ratify it.
NUCLEAR TEST?
Some arms control experts are concerned that the United States is returning to testing as a means of developing new weapons while also sending a signal to rivals such as Russia and China.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, Russia has 5,580 warheads and the United States has 5,044, making up approximately 88% of the world’s nuclear weapons. China has around 500 warheads.
According to the United Nations, over 2,000 nuclear tests were conducted between 1945 and the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, with the United States conducting 1,032 and the Soviet Union conducting 715 respectively.
Russia has not conducted any nuclear tests since the end of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union conducted its last test in 1990.
Putin has stated that if the United States tests a nuclear weapon, Russia will consider doing the same. Last month, Putin lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, including Moscow’s claim that Ukraine had struck deep within Russia with US-made ATACMS missiles.
According to the Arms Control Association, only a few countries have tested nuclear weapons since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991: the US in 1992, China and France in 1996, India and Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2017.
