The State Duma approved the rejection of the nuclear test ban treaty

The State Duma immediately approved in the second and third readings the draft law on the withdrawal of ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The day before, the deputies approved the withdrawal of the ratification in the first reading.

The document, developed on behalf of the chairman of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, was submitted to the parliament on October 13.

At the beginning of October, Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated the withdrawal of ratification. At a meeting of the Valdai discussion club, he said that there is no need to change Russia’s nuclear doctrine, but it is possible to think about withdrawing the ratification of the nuclear test ban treaty, since the United States has not ratified this treaty.

The press secretary of the President of Russia, Dmitry Peskov, said that the withdrawal of ratification does not mean Moscow’s intention to conduct nuclear tests.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1996. Russia has ratified the document, but the USA and China have not.

In modern Russia, nuclear tests related to the explosion of a real nuclear charge have not been conducted. In the USSR, the last test was conducted in 1990.

Since the beginning of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, various pro-Kremlin politicians and public figures, and sometimes directly representatives of the authorities, have announced the possibility of Russia’s use of nuclear weapons or at least the resumption of nuclear tests. Thus, Putin’s friend, the head of the “Kurchatov Institute” Mikhail Kovalchuk proposed to test nuclear weapons on Novaya Zemlya (where explosions were carried out in Soviet times), and the head of RT Margarita Simonyan allowed the possibility of a nuclear explosion over Siberia.