Days after Moscow said that the first warheads had landed in Belarus despite widespread condemnation of the action, President Joe Biden issued a warning this week that the prospect of Russian President Vladimir Putin utilizing tactical nuclear weapons is "real."
“When I was out here about two years ago saying I worried about the Colorado River drying up, everybody looked at me like I was crazy,” Biden told a group of donors in California on Monday. “They looked at me like when I said I worry about Putin using tactical nuclear weapons. It’s real.”
Days after speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, Biden made his most recent statement about the issue, calling Putin's announcement that Russia has stationed nuclear warheads in Belarus "absolutely irresponsible."
The beginning of the deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus was acknowledged last week by both Presidents Putin and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. Some of the warheads are anticipated to have a three-fold increase in force over the atomic bombs detonated by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end World War II.
“As you know, we were negotiating with our ally—Belarusian President Lukashenko—that we would move a part of these tactical nuclear weapons to the territory of Belarus—this has happened,” Putin said on June 16 while speaking at an economic forum in St. Petersburg. “The first nuclear warheads were delivered to the territory of Belarus. But only the first ones, the first part. But we will do this job completely by the end of the summer or by the end of the year.”
Since the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Moscow has never before sent such tactical nuclear warheads—nuclear weapons with a shorter range and lower power that might be deployed on the battlefield—outside of Russia.
Putin initially discussed the nuclear warhead deployment in Belarus in March, citing decades of American deployment of comparable weapons at NATO facilities in many European nations. The revelation comes as senior Kremlin figures have regularly threatened to use nuclear weapons as the conflict in Ukraine continues.
The United States and its allies are keenly monitoring the Russian deployment, as is China, which has repeatedly warned against using nuclear weapons in the conflict in Ukraine.
The United States, France, and the United Kingdom forewarned Russia last October that they would reply with a conventional strike if Moscow deployed nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
In response to the deployment, the United States also stated last month that it has no intention of changing its position on strategic nuclear weapons, stressing that it has not observed any indications that Russia is specifically prepared to use a nuclear bomb. The US declared it "will continue to monitor, certainly, the implications" in Minsk and Moscow.
In May, Russia rejected American criticism of its proposal to transfer tactical nuclear weapons to a close partner, arguing that the United States and its NATO allies had long had nuclear weapons stationed in NATO nations.
Meanwhile, Lukashenko recently referred to the deployment as a special opportunity for Belarus and Russia to come together and asserted that the stationing of nuclear weapons in his nation will increase its security and serve as a deterrence to future aggressors.
“[The deployment] was my demand. It wasn’t Russia who imposed it on me. Why? Because no one in the world has ever gone to war with a nuclear power. And I don’t want anyone to go to war with us. Is there such a threat? There is. I must neutralize that threat,” Lukashenko said, according to the Belarusian news outlet BelTA.
Putin echoed Lukashenko's remarks from the previous week, stating that the stationing of nuclear weapons in Belarus will serve as "an element of deterrence" to those forces that are "thinking about inflicting a strategic defeat."
“Nuclear weapons have been made to ensure our security in the broadest sense of the word and the existence of the Russian state, but we … have no such need [to use them],” the 70-year-old Russian leader said.
How many tactical nuclear weapons would be sent to Belarus, which borders Ukraine as well as NATO allies Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, has not been disclosed by either Putin or Lukashenko.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons reports that Russia is the country with the most nuclear weapons in the world. Russia has 5,977 warheads out of the 12,700 total warheads in the globe, closely followed by the United States with 5,428.
