Russia and weapons of mass destruction

The Russian Federation possesses the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, with 5,459 nuclear warheads and 1,718 deployed missiles. 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 four 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.

As of 2025, 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. The majority of Russian warheads use multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle and have a yield of around 100 kilotons. 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. Since 2022, Russia has claimed to provide tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus. 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.

The Soviet Union carried out 715 nuclear tests from 1949 to 1990, including its first test, its first thermonuclear test in 1955, and the 1961 Tsar Bomba, by far the largest nuclear test 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 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'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. During its war in Ukraine from 2022, Russia has frequently made threats characterized as nuclear blackmail, including nuclear sharing with Belarus and symbolic uses of an intermediate-range ballistic missile, while 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, although with strategic ambiguity on exact 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.

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. 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 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.