The Kremlin on Thursday rejected claims that Russia had resumed nuclear testing after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to restart nuclear weapons tests for the first time since 1992.
President Vladimir Putin on Sunday announced successful tests of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile earlier in October and, on Wednesday, the Poseidon underwater drone.
On Thursday, Trump said he instructed the military to start testing American nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” in response to “other countries testing programs.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Russia was unaware of any country currently conducting nuclear tests and insisted Moscow’s recent trials of advanced strategic weapons “cannot in any way be interpreted as a nuclear test.”
“If somehow the Burevestnik tests are being implied, this is not a nuclear test,” Peskov said.
He said Russia would respond if the United States abandons then-President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.
“If someone departs from the moratorium, Russia will act accordingly,” Peskov said, citing Putin’s repeated warnings.
Though both Burevestnik and Poseidon are nuclear-capable systems, the recent announcements, which followed Trump’s shelving of a second Putin summit and introduction of major oil sanctions, did not indicate whether the tests involved nuclear detonations.
Post-Soviet Russia has never conducted a nuclear explosive test. The Soviet Union’s last test took place in 1990.
Both the United States and Russia in 1996 signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, a landmark agreement that aims to completely ban all nuclear tests.
While Moscow ratified the CTBT in 2000, Washington never took the final step of codifying it into law and Putin revoked its ratification in 2023. The Kremlin denied at the time that Russia intended to carry out nuclear weapons tests if it moved ahead with de-ratification.
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