MOSCOW, June 23. /TASS/. The concept of "limited nuclear war" Washington has been speaking about in the recent time is a dangerous practice pushing countries towards building up their nuclear arsenals, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview with the Kommersant publishers.
"We think that speculations that a nuclear war can be limited are a dangerous practice that destabilizes the international situation and pushes many countries towards building up their nuclear arsenals," he said. "The United States is seeking to impose concepts saying that a nuclear war can be won. More to it, it is developing tools of varying yield, including very low-yield tools that cannot be seen as anything but meant for combat uses."
According to the Russian diplomat, that was the reason why the Americans turned down in the autumn of 2018 a draft joint statement with Russia on preventing nuclear warfare and strengthening strategic stability.
"The picture is alarming. It looks like people, including those belonging to the generation of computer games, who are extremely irresponsible on the issues of the use of military force, including the nuclear factor, are seeking to get hold of all types of buttons," Ryabkov noted.
Accusing Russia of planning a limited nuclear strike, the United States sticks to its favorite tactics of ascribing breaches of liabilities it is going to commit to the opposite side, the Russian senior diplomat noted.
"I is a certain behavioral pattern, algorithm of our American colleagues: to accuse others of what they are doing themselves as they understand that it constitutes a breach of earlier agreements, generally recognized norms and principles of international law," he stressed.
He recalled that the United States had used this tactic when it was quitting from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and now it was using it in a situation around the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTCT).
"The current US administration announced from the very beginning that it was not going to seek ratification of this treaty although Washington knows it perfectly well that if it is not ratified by the United States (or by any other of the remaining seven signatories) the document will never come into force," Ryabkov said. "Notably, it keeps the national testing ground in Nevada in a state of readiness for the resumption of tests and uses Pentagon’s intelligence agency to speculate on the topic that Russia is doing something that violates the nuclear test moratorium."
As for the limiter nuclear war concept, Washington has accused Moscow of reshaping its plans of the use of nuclear arsenals whereas it is what is actually done by Washington, the Russian diplomat added.