Russia has successfully developed a new range of nuclear weapons that are unparalleled in the West and are effectively impossible for America to intercept, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted Thursday, as reported by The Associated Press. "I want to tell all those who have fueled the arms race over the last 15 years, sought to win unilateral advantages over Russia, introduced unlawful sanctions aimed to contain our country's development: All what you wanted to impede with your policies have already happened," Putin said. "You have failed to contain Russia."
Russia's new weapons include "a nuclear-powered cruise missile, a nuclear-powered underwater drone, and new hypersonic missile that have no equivalent elsewhere in the world," AP writes.
Putin cited the 2002 decision by the U.S. to withdraw from the Cold War-era Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as well as American efforts to subsequently develop missile defense systems, for fueling Moscow's determination to create weapons that can get around the protections. "The Obama administration [had] continued to develop and deploy anti-missile defenses, both in the United States and in Europe, resurrecting in Russia Cold War-era concerns that the Americans would leverage this new ABM capability to subject Russia to nuclear blackmail, threatening a nuclear strike for which Russia would have no response," Newsweek explains.
President Trump has aggressively pushed for rebuilding the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including a line about modernizing the Cold War technology in his own State of the Union address. Critics have slammed his plans, saying they would provoke an international arms race.
Putin, though, noted that the weapons Russia has developed are unrivaled and while they "may appear [elsewhere] someday … by that time we will develop something new."
The Russian president added: "No one has listened to us. You listen to us now."