Russia-Belarus Stage 64,000-Troop Nuclear Drill as Putin Visits China

This maneuver echoes the Soviet alert during Able Archer ’83 and the U.S.–NATO nuclear-sharing exercises that began in the 1960s, but with the roles reversed: a nuclear power integrating a formally non-nuclear ally on NATO’s frontier. It sits atop a long arc of unraveling arms-control—New START’s suspension in 2023, CTBT pull-out the same year, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum’s erosion—signaling a drift toward a post-treaty multipolar deterrence system where hosting warheads trumps written norms. Whether the drill proves mere theater or a prelude to escalation, it chips away at the 1968-era non-proliferation consensus; on a century scale it may be remembered less for the missiles launched than for normalizing cross-border nuclear basing, a threshold that could unlock copy-cat arrangements from Seoul to Riyadh and make crises like 1962’s Cuba feel routine.