The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has warned that Russia has expanded its nuclear arsenal by adding nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles, a callback to such weapons harnessed during the Cold War by the U.S. and Soviet Union.
The DIA did not offer further details in its 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment, which was unveiled in a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations hearing on May 15 with the agency’s director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse.
“Russia remains a significant aggressive and enduring threat against the United States and its neighbors,” Kruse said at the hearing. “Moscow has remained steadfast in its demands for Ukrainian neutrality, authority over the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, and further partitioning the Ukrainian state. Russia will continue its military strategy of attrition, focusing on degrading Ukraine’s ability and will to resist while facing its own significant losses of equipment and personnel.”
Such a capability would likely be employed on beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles, such as the Vympel R-37, the main armament of the MiG-31 Interceptor, or some other long-range weapon, FlightGlobal reported Thursday.
Carrying nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles follows a broader trend by Russia toward using nuclear assets to counter much larger forces of its NATO adversaries, Military Watch magazine reported Wednesday.
A nuclear-armed variant of the R-37 could be particularly useful against stealth aircraft such as the F-35, which has been deployed in significant and growing numbers across Russia’s European, Arctic, and Far Eastern borders by Western allies.
The R-37 is the world’s fastest known air-to-air missile class at six times the speed of sound and has the second-longest range in the world surpassed only by the Chinese PL-XX. It is maneuverable enough to be able to neutralize small fighter-sized aircraft, Military Watch reported. Nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles would reduce the need for accuracy, with a wide blast radius and electromagnetic pulse potentially being highly effective against such targets, including drones.
In the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles were seen as an efficient way to destroy waves of enemy bombers. But such weapons, like the U.S. Air Force’s AIR-2 and AIM-26, were rendered obsolete with improved guidance to beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles, according to FlightGlobal.
“Russia probably maintains a nuclear stockpile of about 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and up to 2,000 nonstrategic warheads,” the DIA said in its assessment. “Russia is expanding its nuclear posture to Belarus by establishing missile and nuclear-capable aircraft capabilities, renovating a nuclear weapons storage site, and training Belarusian crews to handle tactical nuclear weapons.
“Throughout the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russia has used nuclear-related rhetoric and military exercises to signal its resolve and deter Russia-perceived Western involvement in the conflict. However, Russia is very unlikely to use nuclear weapons in the conflict unless Russian leadership judged it faced an existential threat to the regime.”
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