A senior Russian diplomat has said that Moscow has not ruled out the possibility of resuming nuclear weapons tests, which it has described as hostile to US policies.
“It’s a question,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the TASS news agency on Saturday about whether Moscow was considering resuming tests.
“And without expecting anything, let me just say that the situation is quite difficult. All the components of it and all the aspects of it are constantly being considered.”
In September, Ryabkov quoted President Vladimir Putin as saying that Russia would not conduct any tests as long as the United States refrained from conducting them.
Moscow has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Putin this month lowered the limits on the country’s nuclear doctrine in response to what Moscow sees as growing tensions with Western countries that support Ukraine in its 33-month-old war against Russia. is
Under the new terms, Russia could consider a nuclear strike in response to a conventional attack on Russia or its ally Belarus that “created a serious threat to their sovereignty and (or) their territorial integrity”.
The changes were prompted by US authorization to allow Ukraine to use Western missiles against targets inside Russia.
Russia’s testing site is located on the remote Novaya Zemlya peninsula in the Arctic Ocean, where the Soviet Union conducted more than 200 nuclear tests.
Putin signed a law last year withdrawing Russia’s ratification of the global treaty banning nuclear weapons tests. He said the move sought to bring Russia into line with the United States, which signed the treaty but never ratified it.