A day after his foreign minister accused the US of violating the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, Russian President Vladimir Putin shocked his audience during his annual state of the union address to his country’s political elite by claiming Russia had developed new nuclear weapons that cannot be shot down by US anti-ballistic missile defenses, according to the Sun.

The missiles, Putin said, are capable of striking almost any point on Earth.

Russia is testing the new line of strategic, nuclear-capable weapons, the president said, as he showed video and animation of Russian ICBMs, cruise missiles and other weapons that he said have been developed by Russia as a result of the US pulling out of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty, the Guardian reported.

In what sounded like an implicit threat, Putin said Russia has repeatedly warned Washington not to go ahead with anti-missile systems that Moscow fears could erode its nuclear deterrent. However “nobody listened to us. Listen now,” he said, to a loud ovation from the crowd of legislators, officials and dignitaries.

While he stressed that Russia isn’t “threatening anyone,” he asserted that, if attacked, Russia wouldn’t hesitate to respond with a nuclear strike. Per the Guardian, the Russian president’s remarks risk sparking an arms race between the Russian Federation and the US reminiscent of the US-Soviet arms race during the Cold War, according to RT.

“Our nuclear doctrine says Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons only in response to a nuclear attack or an attack with other weapons of mass destruction against her or her allies, or a conventional attack against us that threatens the very existence of the state.”

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