Both Washington and Moscow are modernizing their nuclear arsenals, but military leaders worry that Russia is ahead. The Russian military on Wednesday test-fired an RS -24 Yars , one of their newest intercontinental ballistic missiles, Russian state media sources reported. The solid-fueled ICBM , “equipped with a detachable warhead, arrived at the designated area on the Kura test range on the Kamchatka Peninsula at the state-owned Plesetsk Test Space Cosmodrome with the Yoshkar-Ola missile connection,” Russia’s Ministry of Defense announced via TASS . Russia and the United States are both working to modernize their ICBMs, each to the chagrin of the other. In 2010, the countries signed the New START Treaty , ostensibly limiting the number of nuclear weapons each could build and deploy. But Russia has continued to increase its stock of warheads, even as it hews to the treaty limit of 700 launchers, says Hans M. Kristensen, who runs the Nuclear Information Project at
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