Career foreign service officer Eric Edelman said Thursday that President Vladimir Putin's speech unveiling Russia's beefed-up nuclear arsenal is not all bluff — and should be taken "seriously."
In an interview with Newsmax TV's "Newsmax Now," Edelman, whose posts have included U.S. ambassadorships to Turkey and Finland, said some of Moscow's new weaponry has "been under development for quite a bit of time," and even "discussed before."
But he warned against dismissing the Russian leader's boasts.
"[W]e should take the unveiling seriously because it's of a piece of what he's been saying for sometime," and that has threatened "to use these weapons."
The United States is not out of the game, Edelman said.
"We don't need to be driven away from our own plans . . . to modernize our nuclear forces," he said, adding the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review "did call for modest introduction of new capabilities."
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The nation will "move ahead with a very robust nuclear deterrent, which we have," he added.
A more sinister threat, he said, lies in nuclear proliferation.
"Certainly we've got a new nuclear power in North Korea, and an aspirant nuclear power in Iran" that may be moving closer to "a near-nuclear power," he said.
"If that were to happen, the non-proliferation regime that's been in place . . . would be in danger of collapsing, in which case we might be looking at proliferation . . . in even more countries," he warned.
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