MOSCOW, September 2. /TASS/. The United States and NATO countries are trying to blur the balance of responsibility for the use of nuclear weapons, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on the Rossiya-24 round-the-clock television news channel.
"At a recent NPT review conference Russia and other countries expressed concern about this practice [nuclear weapons proliferation], and voiced the fear that the United States might spread it outside of Europe, where all this has been going on for decades, to other regions - to Asia. All these are legitimate questions. Who, may I ask, erodes this line? Who violates this most important balance of responsibility in handling nuclear weapons and approaches to their use? As we can see, it is our adversaries that have been fanning tensions," Ryabkov said. "We are urging the United States and its NATO allies to take a different approach and to display responsibility in this area, the way Russia does."
Ryabkov said "the practice of NATO's so-called joint nuclear missions for many years has caused deep concern."
"Aircrews are trained in the use of nuclear weapons. These crews represent countries that in accordance with the meaning of the NPT are non-nuclear ones," he stressed.
In addition, Ryabkov said that Russia would be ready to use nuclear weapons, if the country’s very existence was under threat. This is spelled out in the Russian military doctrine.
"The Russian military doctrine, as well as the Basic Principles of State Policy in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence, exhaustively describe all the scenarios envisaging a theoretic situation in which we may use nuclear weapons. These scenarios boil down to aggression against Russia and its allies with weapons of mass destruction or aggression with the use of conventional weapons that endanger the very existence of the state," he concluded.