Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov charged during a Nov. 11 press conference that U.S. President Donald Trump’s Oct. 30 statement, in which he said the U.S. was going to “start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis” was driven by an American shift underway which would make nuclear war an actual policy option. Lavrov referred to a Nov. 4 confirmation hearing of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, in which one of the witnesses was Robert Kadlec, nominated for the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Deterrence Policy and Chemical and Biological Defense Programs. “He said that President Trump’s decision to resume nuclear tests was driven by geopolitical considerations,” Lavrov revealed. “As before, there is no technical need to conduct such tests. That’s a strong statement. I’m not sure whether the speaker himself realizes the gravity of what he said, but we are compelled to interpret this as confirmation of what we have been saying all along, which is that there is no technical necessity for such tests. He went on to say that the goal was geopolitical and thus drove the point home for us.
“What may the geopolitical goal of the United States look like? Domination, right? The use of a nuclear weapons argument in this setting is alarming and represents a significant departure from the concept once agreed upon by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, where a nuclear war cannot be won and therefore must never be fought.”
Kadlec “also stated that nuclear options should be developed to respond to certain regional conflicts that may flare up,” Lavrov continued. “That, too, is a rather curious statement. It’s a direct tell that this gentleman, once in office, will be thinking in terms of using nuclear threats in order to achieve the outcomes that the United States may need in a particular region.”
