This year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly brandished the nuclear sword, reminding everyone that Russia has the largest atomic arsenal in the world to try to dissuade the West from increasing its support for Ukraine.
The Russian leader ordered his army to conduct exercises that included nuclear weapons on the battlefield, with his ally Belarus.
He announced that Russia will begin producing intermediate-range land-based missiles that were banned in 1987 by a now-defunct treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union.
And last month, it lowered the threshold for deploying its arsenal by reviewing the country’s nuclear doctrine.
Putin is banking on those thousands of warheads and hundreds of missiles as a massive doomsday machine to offset NATO’s massive advantage in conventional weapons and deter what he sees as threats to Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Here’s a look at Russia’s atomic arsenal and the issues surrounding it:
Strategic weapons
The Federation of American Scientists estimated this year that Russia has a total inventory of 5,580 deployed and non-deployed nuclear warheads, while the United States has 5,044. Together, they represent 88% of the world’s nuclear weapons.
Most of them are strategic or intercontinental weapons. Like the United States, Russia has a nuclear triad of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), long-range bombers, and ICBM-armed submarines.
Since Putin came to power in 2000, the Kremlin has been working to modernize components of the Soviet-made triad, deploying hundreds of new land-based missiles, putting new nuclear submarines into service and upgrading nuclear-capable bombers. Russia’s effort to renew its nuclear forces has helped prompt the United States to launch a costly modernization of its own arsenal.
Russia re-equipped its strategic missile ground forces with Yars mobile ICBMs, and recently began deploying Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles—heavy, silo-based missiles called “Satan II” in the West—to gradually replace some 40 R-missiles. 36M of Soviet manufacture. The Sarmat has only had one known successful test and reportedly suffered a massive explosion during an aborted test last month.
The navy commissioned seven new Borei-class atomic-powered submarines, each carrying 16 nuclear-tipped Bulava missiles, and plans to build five more. They are intended to form the core of the triad’s naval component along with some Soviet-era nuclear submarines still operating.
Russia still relies on Soviet-made Tu-95 and Tu-160 strategic bombers carrying nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Moscow has restarted production of the supersonic Tu-160 that was halted after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, in order to build dozens of modernized aircraft with new engines and avionics.
Non-strategic weapons
The United States estimates that Russia has between 1,000 and 2,000 nonstrategic or tactical nuclear weapons intended for use on the battlefield, which are typically much less powerful than strategic warheads capable of destroying entire cities. Russia has high-precision ground-launched “Iskander” missiles with a range of up to 500 kilometers, which can be equipped with either a conventional or a nuclear warhead. Its air force has a fleet of MiG-31 fighter jets carrying a hypersonic “Kinzhal” missile, which can be equipped with a nuclear or conventional warhead.— AP Russia has widely used conventional versions of both the Iskander and the Kinzhal against Ukraine .
As part of the Kremlin’s nuclear message, Russia and its ally Belarus held exercises to train their troops with battlefield nuclear weapons in May, shortly after Putin began his fifth term.
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