The Russian leader’s vaunting of his arsenal was mainly about attention-seeking, but dangerous developments are shaking up nuclear policy

Vladimir Putin is famous for taking his clothes off in public. But the latest display of naked power by Russia’s president was delivered fully clothed before a well-dressed, adoring audience in a Moscow exhibition centre.

It was quite a show. In what amounted to a state-of-the-nation address, he hailed a new generation of Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles, underwater drones and nuclear-powered cruise missiles.

Russia’s revamped arsenal would prove “invincible”, Putin declared. US attempts to build missile shields – and it was the US all this was aimed at – would be rendered futile.

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He enthused about “hypersonic” missiles hitting targets with the “speed of a meteorite” and weapons named “Dagger” and “Satan”. It was Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars all over again, plus PowerPoint.

There was a touch of the showman about the performance that the Gipper would have recognised. Putin faces elections on 18 March. Although he has ensured he cannot lose, his domestic record is unimpressive. So like unscrupulous politicians everywhere, he conjured up a foreign threat: Amerika.

“They have not succeeded in holding Russia back,” Putin said, harking back to the US decision in 2002 to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. “Now they need to take account of a new reality and understand that everything I have said today is not a bluff.” Cue loud applause.

There were shades, too, of the door-to-door salesman claiming to offer brand-new products when in fact the gear has been around for years.

Yet that was the serious point at the heart of Thursday’s Moscow circus. Putin’s big show was more about attention seeking than firing the starting gun in a new nuclear arms race.

The cold war has not suddenly returned – although Putin always appears nostalgic for simpler Soviet days of binary global superpower rivalry.

But there is no argument that disturbing, dangerous developments are shaking up the arcane world of nuclear weapons policy that involve Russia, the US and multiple other countries, too. The pre-1991 arms control structures are breaking down. Key treaties are bypassed or broken.

Barack Obama tried to reduce the importance of nuclear weapons to US defence. One success was the 2011 New Start strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia.

But Obama also accepted the Pentagon’s view that the US must update its arsenal. In 2016, the Pentagon said it would spend about $100bn from 2017 to 2022 to “sustain and modernise nuclear forces”.

Obama did not reverse George W Bush’s abrogation of the ABM treaty, which ushered in a new era of ballistic missile defence. The US said its deployments in eastern Europe, South Korea and Japan were a strictly defensive response to the threat from Iran and North Korea. Neither Russia nor China bought that, saying their ability to retaliate if attacked was being compromised.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A White House aide carries a briefcase known as the ‘football’, containing nuclear weapon codes. Latest US policy seeks ‘usable’ nuclear arms. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review, published last month, created even bigger uncertainties. It placed new emphasis on acquiring “usable” tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons that, unlike strategic systems, could hypothetically be used in actual or potential conflicts zones such as Syria or the Baltic republics.

Proving the Pentagon has a macabre sense of humour, these weapons are described as “low-yield”, even though they could have greater explosive power than the atom bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.

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Citing new threats in space, cyberspace, and from terrorism, the Trump review also proposed loosening the conditions under which the US might go nuclear – for example, in response to a non-nuclear attack that caused mass casualties (such as the September 11 attacks).

Critics say that far from acting as a deterrent, this makes nuclear war more likely.

China’s steady expansion of its nuclear weapons capability, North Korea’s threatening activities, and the failure of all acknowledged nuclear weapons states, including Britain, France, Israel, Pakistan and India, to abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s commitment to gradually eliminate nuclear arsenals are all adding to the anxieties and instability roiling weapons policy.

The problem is, the bipolar world in which Vladimir Putin grew up, governed by fixed doctrines of deterrence and “mutual assured destruction”, has vanished. There is no absolute balance of power any more, assuming there ever was. Like the US and others, Russia is vainly seeking certainty where certainty no longer exists.