Soviet Union and weapons of mass destruction

Common card · No. 437230

The Soviet Union had, by 1991, the world's largest stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. It carried out its first nuclear test in 1949 and its first multi-stage thermonuclear test in 1955. It was one of the five nuclear-weapon states of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and its biological weapons program proceeded despite its ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention. These programs were inherited primarily by Russia. In 1991, the Soviet Union possessed approximately 29,000 nuclear warheads. The Soviet Armed Forces operated a nuclear triad that deployed over 10,000 strategic nuclear weapons: 6,280 warheads assigned to the Strategic Rocket Forces' 1,334 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 3,626 warheads to the Soviet Navy's 914 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and 974 cruise missiles and bombs to Long Range Aviation's 106 Tu-95MS and Tu-160 bombers. The Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear tests, second only to the United States. These were primarily at Semipalatinsk...

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