Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov with President Vladimir Putin at a military ceremony organized on June 22, PHOTO: Yuri Kochetkov / AP / Profimedia Images
Moscow claims that the United States practiced a nuclear attack on Russian territory during recent drills, Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov said at a meeting of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, according to RBC Ukraine.
Belousov stated that the US regularly conducts exercises of its strategic offensive forces.
“The most recent such exercise, Global Thunder 2025, included, I emphasize, a rehearsal of a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the territory of the Russian Federation. It took place in October of this year,” the minister said.
According to him, such exercises are part of a larger set of measures that would include, according to Moscow, possible plans of the United States to resume nuclear tests, a fact that, he says, significantly increases the level of danger for Russia.
Vladimir Putin threatens that Russia will also conduct nuclear tests if the US resumes testing
President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered top Russian officials to draw up proposals for a possible resumption of nuclear weapons testing after his US counterpart, Donald Trump, announced last week that the US would resume such tests.
The Russian leader convened the Security Council on Wednesday.
Putin ordered the ministries of defense and foreign affairs and the security services to “gather information on this matter” and make “proposals on the possible start of preparatory work for nuclear weapons tests,” AFP also notes.
The US last conducted a nuclear test in 1992, China and France in 1996, and the Soviet Union in 1990. Post-Soviet Russia, which inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal, has never done so, according to Reuters.
Trump announced that the US will “do some tests”
The US president recently announced that he has ordered the military to resume nuclear weapons testing after a 33-year hiatus.
“We're going to do some testing, yes, and other countries are doing the same. If they're doing it, we're going to do it,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Oct. 31 in response to a question from AFP.
On Sunday, November 2, the US Secretary of Energy said that the nuclear tests ordered by US President Donald Trump will not, for now, involve nuclear explosions.
“I think the tests we're talking about now are system tests,” Wright said in an interview with Fox News. “These are not nuclear explosions, but what we call non-critical explosions,” the official added.
The test involves all the other parts of a nuclear weapon to see if they work and can trigger a nuclear explosion, the US Energy Secretary, whose department is responsible for testing US nuclear weapons, also said.
The tests will be conducted on new systems to ensure that the replacement nuclear weapons are more capable than their predecessors, Wright said on Fox News' “The Sunday Briefing.”
