Donald Trump and the US have been issued a chilling threat by the Kremlin just hours after the US President ordered the Pentagon to restart nuclear weapons tests for the first time in over 30 years. On Thursday, the Russian Government rejected claims that it had resumed its own nuclear testing, despite an announcement on Sunday (October 26) by Vladimir Putin that it had successfully tested the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile earlier in October and, on Wednesday (October 29), the Poseidon underwater drone.

On Thursday, Mr Trump said he instructed the military to start testing American nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” in response to “other countries testing programmes.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Russia was unaware of any country currently conducting nuclear tests and insisted Moscow’s recent trials of advanced strategic weapons “cannot in any way be interpreted as a nuclear test”. “If somehow the Burevestnik tests are being implied, this is not a nuclear test,” he said.

He then warned that Russia would respond if the US abandons former President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.

“If someone departs from the moratorium, Russia will act accordingly,” Peskov said, citing Putin’s repeated nuclear sabre rattling.

Though both of Russia’s Burevestnik and Poseidon are nuclear-capable systems, the recent announcements – which came after Mr Trump postponed a second Putin summit and introduced major oil sanctions – did not indicate whether the new tests involved nuclear detonations.

The US has more nuclear weapons than any other country, Mr Trump said, with Russia second and China a “distant third”. After meeting with China’s Xi Jinping in South Korea, the US President said the nuclear test sites would be determined at a later stage.

The last time the US tested a nuclear bomb was in September 1992. The test took place at an underground facility in the western state of Nevada.

In 1996, both the US and Russia signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), a landmark agreement that aims to completely ban all nuclear tests. It was adopted by the UN, but nine nations have yet to ratify the treaty, including China, Iran, Israel, the US and North Korea.

While Moscow ratified the CTBT in 2000, Washington never took the final step of codifying it into law, and Putin revoked its ratification in 2023. The Kremlin denied at the time that Russia intended to carry out nuclear weapons tests if it moved ahead with de-ratification.