The Kremlin’s constant nuclear boasts may have finally struck a chord in the White House, with President Donald Trump ordering the resumption of US nuclear weapons tests.
“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump wrote in a post on social media Thursday.
It was not immediately clear whether Trump was referring to a nuclear weapons test, or a test of a nuclear-capable weapons system. His announcement came shortly before a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, but he indicated China had not prompted his decision, telling a reporter later Thursday that “it had to do with others.”
Trump’s order came just hours after Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, visiting a military hospital in Moscow, dropped his latest nuclear bombshell. Sitting alongside the chief doctor and a carefully selected cast of Russian servicemen wounded on the front lines of the brutal war in Ukraine, Putin claimed that another “invincible” Russian weapon had been successfully tested.
This time it was the Poseidon – an experimental nuclear-powered underwater torpedo which military analysts suggest may have a range of more than 6,000 miles (9,650 km) and which Putin revealed has now been test-launched for the first time.
“The Poseidon’s power significantly exceeds that of our most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile,” the Russian president told his already war-scarred audience. “It is unique in the world,” he added, while intercepting the weapon would be “impossible.”
Formidable arsenal
Putin mentioned, almost as an aside, that the long-anticipated and massive Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, popularly referred to as the “Satan 2,” will also soon be deployed – a low-key announcement of the arrival of what has been widely dubbed the world’s deadliest nuclear weapons delivery system.
It’s the second time in a week that Putin has boasted of new weapons of mass destruction poised to join Russia’s already formidable nuclear arsenal. The US and Russia agreed to limit their arsenals of nuclear arms under the New START treaty, which came into force in 2011. Under the agreement, both countries had seven years to meet defined limits on the number of deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons they can have. The treaty, however, is due to expire in February 2026.
Just days before the Poseidon announcement, the Kremlin strongman announced that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik – or Storm Petrel – claimed by its military to be capable of flying at subsonic speeds, using nuclear fuel, for virtually unlimited time and distance.
Of course, there are serious technical doubts about the practicality of weapons that depend on notoriously unreliable, not to mention toxic, nuclear power. Their deployment, if it happens at all, is likely to be a long, long way off.
For its part, the Kremlin sees its nuclear saber-rattling less as a direct military threat and more of a diplomatic tool: a cost-effective and immediate way of getting the US and the West at large to take notice; to give Moscow what it wants in Ukraine, and to focus minds on the potential existential threat that a provoked or denied Russia could pose.
The Kremlin already feels both of those things over Ukraine: provoked most recently by the debate over whether or not to supply Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles, which would put targets in and around Russia’s biggest cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg under threat; and denied by the failure of Washington to force Ukraine and its European backers to accept Moscow’s maximalist terms to end the fighting in Ukraine.
Certainly, the timing of the latest threats, as diplomatic progress with the United States has stalled, has been less than subtle.
But for the Kremlin, the response from the White House has been unexpected.
As Trump – frustrated by the Kremlin’s consistent refusal to immediately end its war in Ukraine – hinted at canceling a planned Budapest summit with Putin, before imposing sanctions on Russia’s two biggest oil companies, the Russian president made sure he was pictured overseeing what he insisted were “planned” nuclear triad drills in which long-range missiles were test-launched from land, sea and air.
It was a classic bit of Kremlin nuclear saber-rattling theater, but seemed to elicit little US response.
Loose talk
Days later, the Burevestnik cruise missile tests were announced by Putin dressed, somewhat unusually, in a military uniform. But even that was waved off by a dismissive White House.
“And I don’t think it’s an appropriate thing for Putin to be saying either, by the way,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Monday, on his way to Asia for a three-stop tour that included a landmark meeting with Chinese leader Xi.
“He ought to get the war ended, a war that should have taken one week is now in its fourth year, that’s what he ought to do instead of testing missiles,” Trump added.
But by ignoring that advice and then immediately announcing the testing of the nuclear-powered Poseidon torpedo, potentially capable of wreaking radioactive destruction on entire coastal regions of the United States, the Kremlin may have inadvertently edged the White House into that decision to resume nuclear weapons tests of its own.
It may be a lesson in the hazards of mixing loose talk with nuclear weapons in an increasingly volatile world. And what may have been intended by the Kremlin as a way of bolstering its arguments over Ukraine, has possibly plunged us all into new, dangerous and unpredictable era.