Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “did not give instructions to start preparations” for nuclear tests.
According to him, Russia would be forced to conduct such tests if they were conducted by the United States.
The topic of nuclear tests was discussed at Putin’s meeting with members of the Security Council on 5 November. Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov suggested at the meeting that Putin immediately begin preparations for nuclear tests on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, referring to US President Donald Trump’s statements that the United States intends to conduct nuclear weapons tests because other countries are conducting them.
Alexander Bortnikov, director of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), said the FSB did not yet understand what Trump meant.
As a result, Putin instructed Russia’s Foreign Ministry, Defence Ministry, intelligence services and civilian agencies to make proposals on the possibility of preparing for nuclear weapons tests. He did not explicitly order test preparations.
As Peskov said in an interview with VGTRK correspondent Pavel Zarubin, which aired on 9 November, “first we need to understand whether it is necessary to do it. It must be a very serious, well-founded, verified decision. This is what our experts will be dealing with now.”
Peskov also said Moscow did not yet understand what the US president meant when he said other countries were conducting nuclear tests.
“We know for sure that neither Russia nor China is engaged in testing nuclear weapons,” Peskov said.
He also rejected the interpretation of the tests of the Burevestnik missile and the Poseidon submersible (Russian authorities claim it is powered by nuclear propulsion) as nuclear weapons tests, saying such an interpretation would be illiterate.
In late October, US President Donald Trump announced that the United States would “immediately” begin testing nuclear weapons “on a level playing field” with other countries.
Later in an interview with CBS News, Trump said that “other countries are testing” and he did not want the United States to be “the only country that’s not testing.”
However, Trump did not explicitly say he was referring to a full-scale resumption of nuclear testing with underground explosions – the way they were carried out in the US and the former Soviet Union until the 1990s.
Peskov said Moscow was still waiting for clarification from the US.
Especially after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have increasingly started hinting at the possibility of using nuclear weapons and have taken a number of steps to remove existing restrictions. Russia has suspended the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (although it says it continues to adhere to its provisions), deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, changed its nuclear doctrine, and claims to be developing new weapons capable of carrying nuclear charges, including the aforementioned Burevestnik and Poseidon.