President Vladimir Putin of Russia threatened the West with a new generation of nuclear weapons Thursday, including what he described as an “invincible” intercontinental cruise missile and a nuclear torpedo that could outsmart all American defenses.
The presentation by Putin, which included animation videos depicting multiple warheads aimed at Florida, where President Donald Trump often stays at his Mar-a-Lago resort, sharply escalated the military invective in the tense relationship between the United States and Russia, which has led to predictions of a costly new nuclear arms race.
While Putin may have been bluffing about the weapons, as some experts suggested, he cleverly focused on a vulnerability of U.S.-designed defenses: They are based on the assumption that enemy nuclear missiles fly high and can be destroyed well before they reach their targets.
The new class of Russian weapons, he said, travel low, stealthily, far and fast — too fast for defenders to react.
Putin’s announcement, in his annual state of the nation address, seemed intended to stir the patriotic passions of Russians as he is heading into a re-election campaign, even though his victory is assured in what amounts to a one-candidate race.
He also used the speech to reassure Russians the military buildup was taking place even as the government was spending big sums to improve the quality of their lives. But the main attention grabber was the weapons.
The Trump administration has said that countering the world’s two other superpowers, Russia and China, was becoming its No. 1 national security mission. It has largely blamed Russia’s military modernization for that shift and has justified new work on nuclear weapons and bolstered missile defenses as the appropriate answer.
Putin may have further fueled the tension Thursday by essentially declaring that Russia’s military brains had made America’s response obsolete. He said 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 anywhere and evade interception.
“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,” Putin said.
Given that deception lies at the heart of current Russian military doctrine, questions arose about whether these weapons existed. U.S. officials said the nuclear cruise missile is not yet operational, despite Putin’s claims, and that it had crashed during testing in the Arctic.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.