The Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council, former head of state Dmitry Medvedev, mocked the head of the American Executive, Donald Trump, stating that “nobody knows what he wanted to say when he referred to nuclear tests” and that, probably “he doesn’t even know” what he wanted to assert.
Medvedev is referring to the statement of the American president, who last Wednesday claimed that the USA will immediately resume nuclear tests. Trump said he ordered the US Army to restart these tests after a 33-year break just a few hours before his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, thus raising the stakes of the large-scale summit in Busan between the two leaders.
The American president wrote in a social media post that he instructed the Department of Defense to begin “immediately” testing nuclear weapons “on an equal footing” with the nuclear testing programs of other nations, specifically mentioning Russia and China’s nuclear arsenals. “The United States holds more nuclear weapons than any other country. This was achieved, including through a complete modernization of existing weapons, during my first term. Russia is second, and China is far behind, but will catch up in five years,” Trump wrote. “Because of the testing programs of other countries, I instructed the War Department to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal footing. The process will begin immediately,” the American leader insisted.
Now, Medvedev says that Trump doesn’t even know what he wanted to say. “But he is the President of the United States. And the consequences of such statements are inevitable: Russia will have to assess the opportunity to conduct full nuclear tests,” Dmitry Medvedev wrote in a post on X. The reaction comes in the context where Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered high officials of the Russian Federation on Wednesday to present plans for a possible resumption of nuclear tests, a direct response to the surprising instruction given by President Donald Trump for the USA to restart tests, for the first time in over three decades. In a televised meeting with his Security Council in Moscow, Putin declared that he warned the USA and other countries that if they “will conduct such tests, Russia will be obliged to take appropriate retaliatory measures.”
He asked the Foreign and Defense Ministries “to do everything possible to gather additional information on this issue, to analyze it in the Security Council and to present coordinated proposals regarding the possible start of preparations for testing nuclear weapons. NBC News writes that several of Putin’s high officials have supported the need to resume tests. The Security Council meeting was supposed to focus on transport security. However, the President of the State Duma of Russia, Vyacheslav Volodin, asked the members to first comment on the announcement made by Washington regarding the resumption of nuclear tests. The USA has not conducted any nuclear tests since 1992, China and France did it last in 1996, and the Soviet Union in 1990.