Russian President Vladimir Putin heads a meeting on military industry issues in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a speech on Thursday in which he praised his country's military operations on behalf of the government of Syria and made a case for how Russia could be stronger moving forward.

"We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces," he said, according to an AFP translation, "especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems." In other words: Russia needs to ensure that its arsenal of nuclear weapons can avoid interception by the enemy in order to deliver their payloads.

The primary enemy that might intercept those missiles is, of course, the United States and its allies in NATO.

The language echoes old Cold War rhetoric: Our missiles must be able to serve as a deterrent to usage by existing as a threat to enemies. If NATO and the U.S. felt comfortable that Russia's incoming nuclear weapons could be stopped before they reached their targets, they don't hold the same power for Russia.

You can't have a new nuclear arms race, of course, without someone to run against. Enter president-elect Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted about how he'd "met some really great Air Force GENERALS and Navy ADMIRALS," a conversation during which the subject of nuclear weapons may have come up. It seems more likely, though, that Trump or someone on his team saw the Putin speech or was briefed on it, and Trump chose to respond with the comment above.

The trend since the late 1980s has been in the opposite direction, winding down the stockpiles of weapons held by the U.S. and Russia.


(That chart excludes further reductions that kicked in in 2011, following the ratification of the New START treaty in 2010.)

Trump and Putin's comments suggest a possible reversal of that direction, though it's not entirely clear what Trump's "until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes" means. Perhaps it means: As long as Russia's revamping its own arsenal.

When he met with The Post's editorial board in March, Trump expressed concern about the use of the bombs, saying, "I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons." Trump has repeatedly indicated, though, that he saw room for the nuclear arms race to heat back up -- this time with more players. In an interview with the New York Times that same month, Trump said that Japan and South Korea might need to be armed with nuclear weapons as a counterweight to North Korea's development of them. He repeated that argument a week later.

As always, it's fraught to take one Trump tweet as a descriptor of where his presidency might be headed. (He has, for example, also tweeted that he never argued for other countries to get nuclear weapons, which is false.) It's also not clear that "strengthen and expand" means more actual nuclear warheads. (The United States will spend an estimated $1 trillion over 30 years to modernize its weapons stockpile, in part because aging nuclear warheads require significant maintenance.) But Trump's tweet does stand in stark contrast to what President Obama said in May, at the site of the first atomic detonation in world history. In Hiroshima, Obama called for "a world without nuclear weapons."

Allowing Trump access to the country's nuclear arsenal was a key rhetorical point used by those who opposed his candidacy. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) repeatedly said that Trump was too "erratic" to be allowed access to the nuclear codes; Hillary Clinton used the same point in an attempt to leverage vote concerns about Trump's temperament to her advantage.

That's the risk of Russia and the United States having more robust nuclear arsenals of course: The idea that those weapons might some day be used.

"Look, nuclear should be off the table," Trump said during a town hall on MSNBC earlier this year. He then added, "But would there be a time when it could be used, possibly, possibly?"