The Russian Foreign Ministry is providing on its website, thorough responses to key strategic questions asked during and since the annual address by the Foreign Minister, made by Sergey Lavrov Jan. 20. One exchange, reported by TASS today, points out that the non-nuclear countries of the collective West are the real proliferation threat. “Recently, speculation about the acquisition of their own or collective military nuclear potential by the states that do not possess nuclear weapons within the meaning of the NPT [the 1968 Non Proliferation Treaty] has become more frequent,” the Foreign Ministry said, reported TASS. “We believe that the arguments and trial balloons on this increasingly fashionable topic have a destructive effect.
“As a result, there is a real threat of nuclear weapons proliferation in the contour of the collective West, which is already not very peaceful….Replicating rhetoric about the possibility and even desirability of advancing towards nuclear weapons not only makes this traditionally very sensitive issue routine and banal, but also implicitly shapes agitated public opinion in the ideological paradigm needed by the relevant political forces.”
The Ministry noted that such processes are taking place in Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, the Nordic countries, South Korea, Japan, and other countries.
“All this is done under the pretext of doubts about the reliability and durability of the American ‘nuclear umbrella’ and the allegedly urgent need to create alternatives for it. At the same time, these countries are also in no hurry to abandon their participation in self-proclaimed ‘nuclear alliances’ with the United States,” the Foreign Ministry said.
“As for such discussions in Germany, we would primarily point to the fact that Berlin’s potential movement towards acquiring nuclear weapons would clearly violate a number of its international obligations,” the ministry noted. “It would be interesting to hear what other EU countries, namely Berlin’s closest neighbors, think about a fully nuclear Germany,” it added.
At the Kremlin, Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov was adamant this morning that French and British nuclear arsenals must be counted in any future strategic stability architecture. “It is important for us that, when discussing the future system of strategic stability, we cannot ignore the nuclear capabilities of U.S. allies in Europe, namely Britain and France. Without this, further discussions will definitely be impossible, as President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated,” he said.
