Russia wants to prepare the ground for nuclear tests, or at least issue a formal warning to this effect. The board of speakers of the State Duma will study at its next meeting the revocation of Moscow’s ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the president of the Russian Legislature, Viacheslav Volodin, announced today.
“At the next meeting of the State Duma Council we will certainly discuss the issue of revoking the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” Volodin wrote on his Telegram account.
“This corresponds to the national interests of our state,” wrote Volodin, who considers it a response to the United States, “which has not yet ratified the agreement.”
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was adopted in 1996 by the United Nations General Assembly. Russia ratified the document, but the United States and China did not. The last time Russia and the United States conducted nuclear tests were in 1990 and 1992, respectively.
In February of this year, Vladimir Putin signed a law suspending Russia’s participation in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the United States, which established that each country could only have a limited number of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons. At that time he warned that if the United States carried out nuclear tests, Moscow would respond in the same way.