(Reuters) -Russia is still awaiting U.S. clarification of President Donald Trump’s remarks on resuming nuclear testing, TASS state news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying late on Tuesday.
Trump had ordered in late October testing of nuclear weapons in the United States, saying the U.S. could not fall behind Russia and China. Peskov said neither Russia nor China had resumed testing.
“We all still have to get some sort of clarification from the American side because neither Russia nor China has resumed any nuclear tests,” Peskov told RT television in comments quoted by TASS.
“We simply can’t say at this point what exactly the U.S. president has in mind.”
Peskov said both Russia and China remained committed to the provisions of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
He had previously said that Moscow did not understand Trump’s statement that other countries were engaged in nuclear testing as it knew of no such tests.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who commands the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, has repeatedly said that if any country proceeds with a nuclear weapons test, Russia will also do so.
Post-Soviet Russia has never tested a nuclear weapon. The Soviet Union last tested in 1990, the United States in 1992 and China in 1996.
In comments to reporters last Friday, Trump reaffirmed that the U.S. would resume nuclear testing, but he did not answer directly when asked whether that would include underground nuclear tests that were common during the Cold War.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Sunday that the nuclear weapons testing ordered by Trump would not involve nuclear explosions at this time, but rather “system tests”.
Wright, whose agency is responsible for testing U.S. nuclear weapons, said the testing involves all the other parts of a nuclear weapon to make sure they are functioning.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Chris Reese, Ron Popeski and Sonali Paul)
