Russian Nuclear Test Site Chief Says Facility Ready to Resume Full-Scale Tests

Russian nuclear illustration. (Wikimedia Commons/Dmitry Terekhov)

JAKARTA - The head of Russia's top-secret nuclear test site said Tuesday that the secretive facility is ready to resume nuclear tests "at any time" if Moscow gives the order.

Some Western and Russian analysts say President Vladimir Putin could have ordered it to try to send a deterrent message to the West if it allows Ukraine to use its long-range missiles to attack Russia, something that is under discussion.

The Russian test site, located on the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, is where the Soviet Union conducted more than 200 nuclear tests, including the detonation of the world's most powerful nuclear bomb in 1961.

The site has been closely monitored by Western spy satellites for activity amid signs of construction work last summer that were shown in open-source satellite imagery.

Rear Admiral Andrei Sinitsyn, the head of the facility, gave an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta published Tuesday, days after President Putin warned the West that it would go to war with Russia if it allowed Ukraine to attack Russian territory with Western-made long-range missiles and spoke of retaliation.

"The test site is ready for the resumption of full-scale testing activities. The site is ready in its entirety. The laboratories and test facilities are ready. The personnel are ready. If the order comes, we can start testing at any time," Rear Admiral Sinitsyn said, according to Reuters on September 18.

Photographed in his navy uniform next to a cabinet filled with books about President Putin and a giant white porcelain polar bear, Sinitsyn painted a picture of a facility in high readiness protected by elite troops.

"The most important thing for us is not to interfere with the implementation of state tasks. If the task of resuming testing is set, it will be completed within the established time frame," he said.

President Putin, who is in charge of the world's largest nuclear power, signed a law last November revoking Russia's ratification of a global treaty banning nuclear weapons tests, a move he said was designed to align Russia with the United States, which signed but never ratified the treaty.

The Kremlin leader said in June that Russia could test nuclear weapons "if necessary" but did not see a need to do so at this time.

Separately, a senior Russian think tank whose ideas sometimes become government policy suggested in May that Moscow should consider a “demonstrative” nuclear explosion to scare the West.

In an article for the business magazine Profil, Dmitry Suslov said Russia needed to act to prevent the West from crossing the red line.

“The political and psychological impact of a nuclear mushroom cloud, which will be shown live on all TV channels around the world, will hopefully remind Western politicians of the one thing that has prevented wars between the great powers since 1945 and which has now largely disappeared – the fear of nuclear war,” Suslov wrote.

Moscow has not tested nuclear weapons since 1990, a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A Russian nuclear test could prompt other countries such as China or the United States to follow suit, starting a new nuclear arms race between the major powers, which stopped nuclear testing in the years after the Soviet collapse.

The United States last tested in 1992. Only North Korea has conducted a test involving a nuclear explosion this century.