Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures during a meeting. File photo

It was on the anvil ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin declared after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and Putin said that Russia would not hesitate to use a nuclear weapon as a last resort, deepening the ramification of the Ukraine war and sending ripples around the world. Many countries, especially in the West, deemed Putin’s statement as breaking the norm.

The norm was that no nuclear-armed country, whatever be the provocation, will never accept any leader threatening to use a nuclear weapon. The effort of all the countries, including the nuclear-powered ones, has been to discourage any talk of nuclear war. But Putin not only used the threat of nuclear weapon, but he had also put the nuclear weapons system in the alert mode.

The Russia-Ukraine war is going for more than a year-and-a-half and both sides had been using missiles and drones. Russia had also targeted the infrastructure in Ukraine extensively, but there has been no talk of resorting to nuclear weapons. But on Thursday, President Putin had revoked Russia’s ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the Russian Duma had ratified in June 2000, six months before Putin became president. Russia had signed the CTBT along with 178 other countries. Among the two nations that did not ratify the treaty were the United States and China. Russia is the first country to have withdrawn from the treaty after ratifying it.

United States’ Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, criticising Putin’s decision, said, “Unfortunately, it represents a significant step in the wrong direction, taking us further from, not closer to, entry into force.” Blinken still hopes to convince the Republicans at home that the US should sign the CTBT though President George H.W. Bush had signed a law which was a unilateral ban on US nuclear testing.

First time round, then president Bill Clinton failed to persuade the Senate in 1999 which has to ratify all foreign treaties. Russia is sure there is a lurking danger in the Russian act of de-ratifying the CTBT. Putin had overseen ballistic missile drills last week, and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said that this was practice for a massive retaliatory nuclear strike against an unnamed enemy. Putin’s Russia seems to believe that there would be a nuclear attack on it, and that it would have to respond. This is a war game going into the danger mode. 

The CTBT Organisation had expressed the hope that Russia would not go ahead with its revocation, and that it would continue to abide by its original decision. France, one of the original signatories, responding to Russia’s decision, said, “Russia’s decision compromises the work of making the treaty universal. We reaffirm the importance of the CTBT and its full implementation.”

The only time that a nuclear weapon was used was in 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which caused the deaths of thousands of civilians in the two cities, apart from causing debilitating injuries on thousands more. It was the horror of the bombing that put the world in anxiety mode, and pushed world leaders to work out ways that a nuclear weapon is never used again.

But at the height of the Cold War that started at the end of the Second World War, superpower rivals, the US and the Soviet Union, had started piling up nuclear missiles. And over the decades through treaties they have been able to bring down the size of the nuclear arsenal that each possessed.  Nuclear power as an alternative to renewable fossil fuels had gained acceptance in much of the world, though nuclear power stations are not so much in favour because of the issue of disposal of nuclear waste.