MOSCOW – Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who oversees arms control, cautioned the incoming Trump administration on Friday against resuming nuclear testing, stating that Moscow would keep its options open in response to what he described as Washington’s “extremely hostile” stance.
The potential resumption of nuclear testing by the world’s two largest nuclear powers, nearly 80 years after the United States tested the first nuclear bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945, could usher in a new and precarious era. Both Russia and the United States, along with China, are currently modernizing their nuclear arsenals as Cold War-era arms control treaties between the Soviet Union and the United States continue to unravel.
Ryabkov explicitly signaled to Washington that Trump had taken a radical position on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) during his first term. “The international situation is extremely difficult at the moment, the American policy in its various aspects is extremely hostile to us today,” Ryabkov said in an interview with Russia’s Kommersant newspaper. He added that Russia’s options for ensuring security and sending politically appropriate signals “do not rule anything out.”
During Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021, his administration discussed the possibility of conducting the first U.S. nuclear test since 1992, according to a 2020 report by the Washington Post. In 2023, President Vladimir Putin formally revoked Russia’s ratification of the CTBT, aligning his country with the United States, which signed the treaty in 1996 but has not ratified it.
Arms control experts fear that the United States may be moving towards a return to nuclear testing to develop new weapons and send a signal to rivals such as Russia and China. Russia, with 5,580 warheads, and the United States, with 5,044, hold about 88% of the world’s nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists. China has approximately 500 warheads.
Between 1945 and the signing of the CTBT in 1996, over 2,000 nuclear tests were conducted, with the United States carrying out 1,032 and the Soviet Union 715, according to the United Nations. Post-Soviet Russia has not conducted a nuclear test since the Soviet Union’s last test in 1990.
Putin has indicated that Russia would consider testing a nuclear weapon if the United States did. Last month, he lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, following reports that Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, only a few countries have tested nuclear weapons, including the United States in 1992, China and France in 1996, India and Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2017, according to the Arms Control Association.