As Tensions With West Rise, Russia Increasingly Rattles Nuclear Saber

It wasn’t an ordinary Valentine’s Day for the students from across Russia arriving at a military institute outside Moscow. Their date was with a Topol, the intercontinental ballistic missile at the heart of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

The new event was part of an initiative to promote careers in Russia’s missile forces, and it also reflected another phenomenon: the rising boastfulness about nuclear weaponry in public life here.

Amid the wave of bellicose rhetoric that has swelled in Moscow since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, officials as high up as President Vladimir Putin have been making open nuclear threats, a public saber-rattling with weapons of mass destruction largely unseen even in the days of the Cold War.

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