The Russian Parliament began this Tuesday (17) the process to revoke the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and the president of the lower house warned the United States that Moscow could even abandon the pact completely. .
Russia has said the aim is to restore equality in the agreement with the United States, which signed but never ratified the 1996 treaty, and that it will not resume the tests unless Washington does so.
But arms control experts are concerned that Russia is closing in on a test that could usher in a new era of great nuclear powers — what the West could perceive as Russia’s nuclear escalation amid war. from Ukraine.
The lower house of the Russian Parliament, the Duma, approved by 412 to zero, without abstentions, the withdrawal of ratification, in the first of three votes.
“Our vote is a response to the US — to its crude approach to its duties to maintain global security,” said House Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, a member of President Vladimir Putin’s Security Council.
“And what we do next — whether we continue to be part of the treaty or not, we won’t tell them. We must think about global security, the security of our citizens and act in accordance with their interests,” said Volodin.
Volodin said the US asked Russia, through the United Nations (UN), not to revoke ratification. He said Moscow’s action was a wake-up call to Washington after its failure to ratify the treaty over the past 23 years. Russia ratified it in 2000.
Putin said on October 5 that he was not ready to say whether Russia should resume nuclear testing following calls from some Russian security experts and parliamentarians for the country to test a nuclear bomb as a warning to the West.
No country except North Korea has carried out a test involving a nuclear explosion this century.
Post-Soviet Russia has never carried out a nuclear test. The Soviet Union carried out the last test in 1990 and the United States in 1992.
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Source: CNN Brasil
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