Russian nuclear test would send warning signal, prompt others to follow suit

LONDON (Reuters) -Russia may be paving the way to conduct a nuclear test, a move that would sharply raise tensions with the West and likely prompt other world powers to resume testing for the first time this century.

President Vladimir Putin last week said Russia’s parliament should consider withdrawing Moscow’s ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which prohibits tests involving nuclear explosions. Parliamentary leaders were due to discuss the issue on Monday.

Some Western security analysts now see a growing likelihood of a Russian test, even though Putin said the aim was only to mirror the position of the United States, which has signed but not ratified the treaty.

“A Russian nuclear test is clearly very much on the cards now. I don’t think it’s a certainty, but it shouldn’t surprise anybody if that happens,” said James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Matthew Harries, director of proliferation and nuclear policy at the RUSI think-tank in London, said cancelling Russia’s ratification would create a “legal and presentational framework for Russia to test if it wants to”.

If Moscow did conduct a test, he said, “it would be a strong form of signalling, to put the nuclear threat in people’s minds, to try to signal resolve and to evoke fear”.

Former Soviet and Russian diplomat Nikolai Sokov went further, saying a Russian nuclear test would mark a very serious escalation towards actually using an atomic weapon.

For that reason, Sokov said, he did not expect Russia to test at this point. Rather, he said, rescinding ratification would be a political step and part of a wider review of Moscow’s security obligations to remove perceived imbalances and “level the field” with the United States.

“At the moment I see a nuclear test as unlikely but the situation is very tense and an escalation is not impossible,” said Sokov, now senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.

He said he could envisage a Russian nuclear test as part of a scenario where the Ukraine war was going very badly for Putin.

“The trick is to get very close to nuclear use but avoid it – to force the adversary to take a step back so the US and NATO think: ‘Is it really worth it?’ To change the calculation of costs and benefits,” Sokov said in a telephone interview.

“At some point you may need to show that you’re very, very serious about possibly using nuclear weapons. That’s where a nuclear underground test can play a big role.”

Sokov said he did not believe that Putin was interested in actually using nuclear weapons, but the risk in such a scenario was that “you simply can lose control of events” and the logic of escalation could lead him to use them even if that was not his intention at the start.

NUCLEAR TABOO

Russia has not conducted a nuclear test since 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It ratified the CTBT in 2000.

Although the treaty has not formally come into force because others including the United States, China, India, Pakistan and Israel have not ratified, it has effectively made nuclear testing taboo. Only North Korea has conducted a test involving a nuclear explosion this century.

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