A special crisis hotline between the U.S. and Russia is not active, the Kremlin said on Wednesday, after Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a change to when Moscow could use nuclear weapons.
Moscow has around 5,580 nuclear warheads, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said earlier this year. Around 1,200 of these are retired, and approximately 4,380 are stockpiled, according to the FAS.
“We have a special secure line for communication between the two presidents, Russia and the United States,” Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. But the channel is not currently in use, he said in remarks reported by Reuters.
On Tuesday, Putin rubber-stamped a change to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which now says Moscow can justify a nuclear strike in response to an attack on Russia by a non-nuclear country, if they are backed by a nuclear-armed nation.
AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin
The document also said Russia could launch a nuclear strike if targeted with a large-scale non-nuclear air attack. This also applies to key ally Belarus, the Kremlin said. Russia stations tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which it used as a springboard for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The more than 1,000 days of war in Ukraine has marked the worst dip in relations between Washington and Moscow since the Cold War. U.S. officials said earlier this week that the White House had approved Ukraine using American long-range ballistic missiles to attack Russian soil, which Moscow condemned as a “new phase of the Western war” and an escalation to the conflict.
Russia has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, followed closely by the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal. Combined, Moscow and Washington control around 90 percent of the nuclear weapons across the globe.
Exact counts vary, but currently nine countries possess a total of roughly 12,100 nuclear weapons—the U.S., France and the United Kingdom within NATO, as well as the non-NATO nations Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
An estimated 1,710 of the warheads that can be used by the Russian military are deployed on the likes of intercontinental ballistic missiles or at strategic bomber bases, the organization said. The U.S. has approximately 1,670 deployed strategic warheads, according to the FAS.
Strategic nuclear weapons are capped by the New START Treaty at 1,550 warheads and a maximum of 700 long-range missiles and bombers. The U.S. deploys 1,419 and Russia 1,549 strategic warheads across bombers and missiles, the Arms Control Association said, as of July.
Non-strategic or tactical nuclear weapons, which are shorter-range and less destructive, are not covered by arms treaties. The State Department said in April that it believed Russia had between 1,000 and 2,000 non-strategic nuclear warheads, including those on air-to-surface missiles, torpedoes, gravity bombs and nuclear mines.
Russia suspended its cooperation with the New START Treaty in February 2023. The U.S. then limited how transparent it was being about its nuclear weapons with Russia, although both parties said they will stick to the limits of the treaty until 2026.
Russia has long been modernizing its nuclear forces, including phasing in its Sarmat and Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles.
As Moscow’s troops poured into Ukraine in late February 2022, Putin placed his country’s nuclear deterrence forces on high alert. Months later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the risks of nuclear conflict had become “considerable.”
Prominent Russian officials, such as former President Dmitry Medvedev, who has stayed on as a hawkish voice on the Kremlin political scene, as well as Russian state television commentators, have frequently mentioned the prospect of nuclear war.
Some state media hosts and guests have suggested that Moscow should launch nuclear strikes on countries, such as the U.S. and U.K., that support Kyiv’s war effort.
Putin said in March this year that Russia was militarily equipped and “ready” for nuclear war. António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, said in September 2022 that the idea of nuclear war had been “once unthinkable,” but now was “a subject of debate.”
“This in itself is totally unacceptable,” Guterres said.
