The Russian Federation possesses the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, consisting of 5,420 nuclear warheads, of which 1,794 have been deployed. It also inherited the expansive Soviet biological and chemical weapons programs, and is suspected to have continued them. It is one of the five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and one of the five countries wielding a nuclear triad. It inherited its weapons and treaty obligations from the Soviet Union. Russia has been alleged to violate the Biological Weapons Convention and Chemical Weapons Convention.

, Russia's triad of strategic nuclear weapons, at approximately 2,832 weapons, comprises 1,254 warheads on its Strategic Rocket Forces' 333 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 992 warheads on its Navy's 192 RSM-56 Bulava and R-29RMU Sineva/Lajner submarine-launched ballistic missiles, on twelve Delfin and Borei-class submarines, and 586 cruise missiles or bombs, for delivery by Long Range Aviation's 67 Tupolev Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic bombers. Russia also possesses the world's largest arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, approximately 1,500, which can be delivered by land, sea, and air-launched weapons. The Russian Space Forces oversee early warning and ballistic missile defense, operating radars such as Voronezh and Don-2N, the Oko and EKS satellites, and the anti-ballistic missile A-135, S-400, and S-300 systems, all of which can themselves be tipped with nuclear warheads.

Russia's predecessor state, the Soviet Union, held the largest nuclear arsenal in history, at 45,000 nuclear warheads in 1986. Russia and the United States together hold 88% of the world's nuclear weapons. The New START treaty limited the number each state could deploy, until its expiration in February 2026. Officially, Russian nuclear weapons use requires an order from the president, co-signed by the Minister of Defence or Chief of the General Staff. Russia extends a nuclear umbrella to member states of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

Since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has frequently made threats characterized as nuclear blackmail. Since 2023, Russia has provided tactical nuclear weapons systems to Belarus. Ukraine destroyed several Russian nuclear-capable strategic bombers in a large drone attack in 2025. Since 2024, Russian policy has broadly allowed nuclear first use, with strategic ambiguity on thresholds, in response to attacks on Russia with weapons of mass destruction, or to conventional attacks that critically threaten its sovereignty, territorial integrity, nuclear forces, or to large air and missile attacks.

The Soviet Union carried out 715 nuclear tests, from its first test in 1949, until 1990. Official numbers and those in the table differ due to eleven tests, all fizzles, cited in other references and the one bomb left in its shaft when the Russians abandoned the Semipalatinsk site to Kazakhstan. This included its first thermonuclear test in 1955, and the 1961 Tsar Bomba, by far the largest nuclear test ever at 50 megatons. Testing occurred at Semipalatinsk, Novaya Zemlya, and Kapustin Yar. Russia signed and ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996 but withdrew ratification in 2023. Russia's nuclear complex, managed by Rosatom, inherited the world's largest stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium, theoretically equivalent to over 40,000 weapons; Ural Electrochemical Combine remains the world's largest uranium enrichment site, and Mayak the world's second largest reprocessing site.

Russia inherited the Soviet biological weapons and chemical weapons programs, each the world's largest, and US intelligence assesses Russia maintains offensive biological and chemical warfare programs. Biological agents were researched from the 1920s, and in contravention of the Biological Weapons Convention from 1975. At its peak, the program employed ~65,000 people.Leitenberg, M., Zilinskas, R., & Kuhn, J. (2012). "Conclusion". In The Soviet Biological Weapons Program (pp. 698–712). Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press. Retrieved February 7, 2021, from The 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak revealed the existence of the program to the Western Bloc. In 1997, Russia declared an arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons, officially declared destroyed in 2017. Russia was accused of using Novichok nerve agent in the 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and 2020 poisoning of Alexei Navalny. Russian forces admitted their use of CS gas (a form of tear gas) during the Russo-Ukrainian war, in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Russia was also accused of using a radiological weapon in the form of polonium-210 in the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Nuclear weapons

History

Soviet era

Production sites Three sites in the Russian SFSR and subsequently Russia produced 145 tons of weapons-grade plutonium (uncertainty ±8 tons) from 1948 to 2010, with a consistent production peak between 1967 and 1989. Following the Moscow test reactor F-1 in 1946, the Mayak site in Chelyabinsk-40 began construction. The first plutonium production reactor A-1 began operation in 1948, fuelling the RDS-1 test. The Mayak site received nine further reactors were constructed. Of these, four were used for plutonium production, the other six reactors primarily produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. Plutonium was also produced by five reactors at the Siberian Chemical Combine in Tomsk-7, and three reactors at the Mining and Chemical Combine in Krasnoyarsk-26. The last plutonium production reactor in Russia is believed to have shut down in 2010. Mayak continues to operate two reactors for tritium and industrial radioisotope production.

Russian sites also produced 1,250 tons of highly enriched uranium (uncertainty ±120 tons) from 1949 to 2010, excluding HEU produced for naval nuclear reactors. Of this, 500 tons was downblended by the Megatons to Megawatts Program, and a further hundred tons were used in production research reactors, nuclear tests, and other downblending programs. Russia is now believed to possess 656 tons between HEU stockpiles and HEU inside weapons themselves. This began with the SU-20 electromagnetic separation plant, but the Soviet project quickly followed the Manhattan Project's gaseous diffusion scheme, constructing the D-1 plant in Sverdlovsk-44, eventually becoming the Ural Electrochemical Combine. The D-1 plant could produce 0.01 million SWU/year. The development of the gas centrifuge and waves of modernizations brought the Ural Electrochemical Combine to 11.9 million SWU/year by 1993. Further enrichment plants were built at the Siberian Chemical Combine, the Zelenogorsk Electrochemical Plant and the Angarsk Electrochemical Combine.

Post-Soviet era

Post-Soviet countries have signed a series of treaties and agreements to settle the legacy of the former Soviet Union multilaterally and bilaterally.

At the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet nuclear weapons were deployed in four of the new republics: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. In May 1992, these four states signed the Lisbon Protocol, agreeing to join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, with Russia the continuator state to the Soviet Union as a nuclear state, and the other three states joining as non-nuclear states.

Ukraine agreed to give up its weapons to Russia, in exchange for guarantees of Ukrainian territory from Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, known as the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. China and France also made statements in support of the memorandum.

Russian invasion of Ukraine

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin placed Strategic Rocket Forces's nuclear deterrence units on high alert, a move heavily condemned internationally. Putin warned that "whoever tries to hinder us in Ukraine would see consequences, you have never seen in your history". According to the former US Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, Putin could potentially turn to nuclear weapons if he perceived an "existential threat" to the Russian state or regime; there has been speculation that he could regard defeat in Ukraine as an existential threat to his regime.

According to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature Food in August 2022, a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, which together hold more than 90% of the world's nuclear weapons, would kill 360 million people directly and more than 5 billion indirectly by starvation during a nuclear winter.

In September 2022, Putin announced the mobilization of Russian forces, and threatened nuclear retaliation against the west if Russia's territorial integrity was threatened.

On February 21, 2023, Putin suspended Russia's participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, saying that Russia would not allow the US and NATO to inspect its nuclear facilities. On March 25, 2023, Putin announced that Russia would be stationing tactical nuclear operations in Belarus. On June 14, 2023, Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko stated that Belarus had started to take delivery of nuclear weapons in a TV interview with Russian state channel, Russia-1.

On 25 September 2024, Putin warned the West that if attacked with conventional weapons Russia would consider a nuclear retaliation, in an apparent deviation from the no first use doctrine. Putin also warned nuclear powers that if they supported another country's attack on Russia, they would be considered participants in such aggression. Putin has made several implicit nuclear threats since the outbreak of war against Ukraine. Experts say Putin's announcement was aimed at dissuading the United States, the United Kingdom and France from allowing Ukraine to use Western-supplied long-range missiles such as the Storm Shadow and ATACMS in strikes against Russia.

Nuclear testing

Soviet nuclear testing

Alleged Russian nuclear testing The US alleged in 2020 that Russia had carried out "nuclear weapons experiments that have created nuclear yield" between 1996 and 2019, but that it was not aware of such individual experiments in 2019. As Russia is a signatory of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, but the treaty is not in force, the legal status of such an experiment is unclear. The same report accused China's nuclear weapons program of constructing the infrastructure for undetectable low-yield tests, but did not allege any tests had occurred.

Arms reduction

The threat of nuclear warfare was a persistent and terrifying threat during the Cold War. At its height, the Soviet Union and United States each mustered tens of thousands of warheads, under the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. By the 1980s, both the United States and Soviet Union sought to reduce the number of weapons the other was fielding. This led to the opening of arms reduction talks in 1982.

This culminated in the signing of the START I treaty in 1991: the first nuclear arms reduction treaty between the two global powers. This first treaty limited the number of deployed warheads in each nation to 6,000, nearly halving the prior 10,000 to 12,000 being fielded in 1991. The considerable success of START I, combined with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, led to the START II treaty. Russia never ratified the treaty, and it did not go into effect. An attempted START III was attempted but could not get past negotiations.