Kremlin says NATO chief’s nuclear weapons remarks are an 'escalation'

Russia has assessed the latest nuclear comments by the North Atlantic Alliance military bloc as an inadmissible "escalation" of ongoing political rivalry between world powers.

The Kremlin said on Monday the US-led NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s remarks pertaining to talks on deploying more nuclear weapons would only exacerbate the threat of atomic warfare.

Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Monday Stoltenberg's remarks were "nothing else but an escalation of tensions."

Peskov added that Russia's President Vladimir Putin would never make comments regarding nuclear weaponry "at his own initiative as he takes the issue seriously."

He pointed out Stoltenberg’s comments appeared to contradict the communique of the Ukraine Conference that said any threat or use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine context was inadmissible.

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Moscow maintains that Washington and its allies in Europe were taking the world to the point of nuclear warfare by giving Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, an unending supply of Western arms and ammo to fight its neighboring country, Russia.

On Sunday, Stoltenberg revealed there were ongoing talks between members on taking missiles out of storage and placing them on standby as a deterrence force.

Stoltenberg said in an exclusive interview with Britain's The Telegraph newspaper’s reporter conducted at the NATO headquarters in Brussels that the US-led bloc was in talks to deploy more nuclear weapons in the face of a growing threat from Russia, North Korea, and China.

“[A] world where Russia, China, and North Korea have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is a more dangerous world,” the chief of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization said.

“I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” Stoltenberg said.

In addition, Stoltenberg further sounded the alarm about China’s alleged nuclear development programs, claiming soon “NATO may face something that it has never faced before, and that is two nuclear-powered potential adversaries — China and Russia.”

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For the time being, Russia and the United States are by far the world’s biggest nuclear powers. They hold about 88 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

The United States has about 100 non-strategic B61 nuclear weapons deployed in five European countries – Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium, and the Netherlands, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The US has another 100 such weapons within its borders.

Russia has about 1,558 non-strategic nuclear warheads, though arms control experts say it is very difficult to say just how many there are due to secrecy.

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