Putin: ‘Invincible’ missile can pierce U.S. defenses
Rhetoric reminiscent of Cold War increases tensions with West
MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin of Russia used his annual state of the nation speech Thursday to threaten Western nations with a new generation of nuclear weapons, including an “invincible” intercontinental cruise missile, and to reassure ordinary Russians that considerable new social spending will improve the quality of their lives.
Putin said that a team of young, high-tech specialists had labored secretly and assiduously to develop and test the new weapons, including a nuclear-powered missile that could reach virtually anywhere in the world and could not be intercepted by existing missile defense systems.
“With the missile launched and a set of ground tests completed, we can now proceed with the construction of a fundamentally new type of weapon,” he said.
Given that deception lies at the heart of current Russian military doctrine, questions were raised about whether this advanced new generation of nuclear weapons actually exists. That remains unclear, but the threat from Putin increases tensions between Russia and the West and revives a bellicose rhetoric that harks back to the Cold War.
Putin’s speech follows a new flurry of concern and strategic gamesmanship. In his own State of the Union address in January, President Donald Trump insisted on the need to “modernize and rebuild” the United States’ nuclear arsenal.
Then, last month, the Trump administration issued a new nuclear policy, vowing to counter a rush by the Russians to modernize their forces.
At the time, an administration official said Trump was concerned about staying ahead in any nuclear race with Russia and, to a lesser degree, with China.
Putin said that the missile was tested at the end of 2017. A video illustrated the weapon flying over a mountain range, then slaloming around obstacles in the southern Atlantic before rounding Cape Horn at the tip of South America and heading north toward the West Coast of the United States.
The cruise missile was among five new weapons introduced by Putin, with each shown in video mock-ups on giant screens flanking him onstage. He threatened to use the weapons and even traditional nuclear arms against the United States and Europe if Russia were ever attacked.
“We would consider any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies to be a nuclear attack on our country,” Putin said. “The response would be immediate.”
Putin said he could not show the actual weapons publicly, but assured his audience of Russia’s main political and prominent cultural figures that they had all been developed.
Putin’s disclosure of the weapons touched off a debate among military experts about whether he was bluffing. If he is not, said Aleksandr M. Golts, a veteran independent Russian military analyst, then “these weapons are definitely new, absolutely new.”
Several analysts writing on Facebook and elsewhere leaned toward the bluff theory. Given the recent history of Russian rockets failing to launch or crashing just after takeoff, the idea that the country suddenly possessed a seamless new generation of flying weapons strained credibility.
Political analysts said it was an effective campaign ploy whether the weapons existed or not. “He’s giving people the image of a future for Russia, and that’s appealing for his domestic audience,” said Alexei V. Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.
Putin’s guns-and-butter, Russia-can-do-it-all speech came 17 days before the March 18 presidential election. It seemed designed to reassure voters that Russia would become a superpower again.