Russia threatens with nuclear tests in the Arctic “at any time”

The statement by Russia’s head of centre that said his secret facility is ready to repeat the nuclear tests “at any time” if it lights the green light. Moscow has not carried out a nuclear test since 1990, a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but western and Russian analysts say President Vladimir Putin can mandate a test in an attempt to send a deterrence message to the West, if he allows Ukraine to use long-range missiles to hurt Russia, which is being discussed. A nuclear test by Russia will encourage other countries such as China or the United States to follow, starting a new arms race between the major forces, which had stopped nuclear tests in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the test field of Russia located in the remote Novaya Zemlya (New Earth) archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, the Soviet Union had carried out more than 200 nuclear tests, including firing the most powerful nuclear bomb ever built in the world, in 1961. It is closely monitored by western spy satellites for activity amid signs of construction work last summer, which are seen in open source satellite images. Vice-Admiral Andrey Sinitsin, head of the facility, gave a rare interview to the official Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, published today, days after Putin warned the West that he would be considered to be fighting directly with Russia if he allowed Ukraine to hit Russian territory with western-built long-range missiles and spoke of retaliation. “ The test field is ready to restart full-scale tests. It is entirely ready. The lab and testing facilities are ready. Personnel’s ready. If an order is given, we can start at any time,” said Shinitsin. Illustrating in his naval uniform next to an office, holding a book on Putin and a huge white porcelain polar bear, Sinitsin painted the image of an installation that is kept in high readiness and protected by elite troops. “The most important thing for us is not to disrupt the performance of state tasks. If the task of repeating the tests is put, it will take place within the prescribed time frame,” he said. Demonstration test Putin, who led the world’s largest nuclear power, last November signed a law withdrawing Russia from ratifying the global nuclear test ban treaty, a move he said was aimed at aligning Russia with the United States, which signed but never ratified the treaty. Russian diplomats had then stated that Moscow would not repeat the nuclear tests unless Washington did. Putin said in June that Russia would carry out a nuclear test “if necessary”, but does not see the need to do so at the moment. The United States carried out their last nuclear test in 1992. Only North Korea conducted nuclear tests this century. A high-ranking member of a Russian think tank, whose ideas sometimes become a government policy, suggested in May in Moscow to consider the possibility of a “descriptive” nuclear explosion to scare the West. In an article in Profil, a business magazine, Dmitry Suslov had stated that Russia needs to act to prevent the West from crossing the red line. “The political and psychological effect of a nuclear mushroom, which will show it on live transmission all the television networks of the world, we hope it will remind Western politicians of the only thing that has prevented wars between the great powers since 1945 and which has been largely forgotten, which is the fear of nuclear war” Suslov wrote.