Just days after withdrawing from the international treaty banning nuclear testing, Russia said it had tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that could be equipped with nuclear warheads. The Russian Defense Ministry said today that a Bulava missile was fired from the submarine “Emperor Alexander III” in the White Sea and hit a target on the Kamchatka peninsula, thousands of kilometers away, at the scheduled time. This is the first test of a Bulava missile in more than a year.
The twelve-meter-long Bulava missiles, with the NATO code name SS-NX-30, have a range of 8,000 kilometers and are a centerpiece of Russia’s nuclear strategy. According to the Russian army, the strategic submarine “Emperor Alexander III”, from which the projectile was fired, is equipped with 16 Bulava missiles.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly used rhetoric about nuclear weapons that is aggressive from a Western perspective. In the summer, Moscow transferred tactical nuclear weapons to the territory of its ally Belarus, whose territory borders several NATO and EU states.