Sergei Ryabkov said
that such actions "clearly show that Washington is determined to pursue
the path of confrontation and keep lowering the threshold for the use of
nuclear weapons".
MOSCOW, February 22.
/TASS/. Moscow condemns Washington’s attempts to simulate a limited nuclear
strike on Russia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told TASS on
Saturday.
"The United
States continues a series of command-staff exercises and other drills involving
the simulation of limited nuclear strikes, particularly - as it became known
recently - on targets in Russia," he said, commenting on a recent military
drill in the US. "We condemn such actions because they clearly show that
Washington is determined to pursue the path of confrontation and keep lowering
the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons," Ryabkov added.
"The US is
embarking on a highly dangerous game instead of focusing on efforts to
strengthen the arms control system that would also cover nuclear weapons,"
the senior Russia diplomat pointed out. "As we have stressed on numerous
occasions, we would use nuclear weapons only in two exceptional cases - if Russia
faces an attack with weapons of mass destruction or an aggression involving the
large-scale use of conventional arms that puts the country’s existence at
risk," he emphasized.
Ryabkov pointed out
that "allegations saying that we could act based on the ‘escalation for
the sake of de-escalation’ principle are just idle talk that has nothing to do
with reality." "This is why we would like to once again draw the
attention of our American colleagues to the need to dot all the i’s in their
defense planning and once again confirm the well-known formula that has been
there since the Soviet era, which says that that there can be no winners in a
nuclear war and it should never be unleashed."
"The United
States’ reluctance to confirm the formula gives us more reason to believe that
Washington continues drawing up scenarios involving the use of nuclear
weapons," the Russian deputy foreign minister stressed.
A senior Pentagon
official told reporters earlier that the US had conducted a classified military
drill, the scenario of which "included a European contingency where you’re
conducting a war with Russia and Russia decides to use a low-yield, limited
nuclear weapon against a site on NATO territory," the official said,
adding: "During the course of the exercise, we simulated responding with a
nuclear weapon".
Source: ITAR-TASS
22-02-2020
