This U.S. Navy handout image shows Baker, the second of the two atomic bomb tests, in which a 63-kiloton warhead was exploded 90 feet under water as part of Operation Crossroads, conducted at Bikini Atoll in July 1946 to measure nuclear weapon effects on
This U.S. Navy handout image shows Baker, the second of the two atomic bomb tests, in which a 63-kiloton warhead was exploded 90 feet under water as part of Operation Crossroads, conducted at Bikini Atoll in July 1946 to measure nuclear weapon effects on warships. The United States said on April 25, 2014, it was examining lawsuits filed by the Marshall Islands against it and eight other nuclear-armed countries that accuse them of failing in their obligation to negotiate nuclear disarmament. REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Handout via

To make a joke about a nuclear war threat is no laughing matter at all. More so if it's been uttered at least three times in less in two months. Then again, Russian President Vladimir Putin may not really be kidding at all every time he reminds the west of his country's nuclear arsenal.

Since August, Russia had been consistently laying down the nuclear war scenario, presumably because the economic sanctions placed on it are already inflicting pain, thus forcing Mr Putin to create a psychological warfare involving his nukes. In September, he flatly told the world to remember that Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations, and "this is a reality, not just words."

An official State Department report update disclosed Russia has 1,643 nuclear missiles ready to launch, just over by a piece than the U.S. The presence of the entire nukes, however, violate the New START treaty signed in 2010 by the U.S. and Russia under former President Dmitry Medvedev. The treaty had stipulated that deployed warheads should be kept to a maximum number of only 1,550. Way back in 2012, Russia only had 1,499 deployed warheads, compared to the 1,722 of the U.S.

While the U.S. worked to dispose its nuclear weapons, Russia was doing the opposite and produced 150 new nuclear warheads in the last two years. The New START treaty does not expire until 2020, but this early, Russia has announced to allocating $700 billion to overhaul its entire nuclear arsenal by the same year.

While Russia has been seen to soften and concede to NATO pressure to withdraw its forces Ukraine, experts believed Mr Putin will not really yield at all. Proof are the various economic deals signed with China, one of its ally.

Sergei Guriev, Russian economist at the Paris university Sciences Po, quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald, said Mr Putin's priorities are focused on economic growth. "If he has to choose between growth and Crimea," Mr Putin will hands down choose the latter.

Regardless of which country will pull the trigger, Dr Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician who founded the International Physicians against Nuclear War, warned the next world war will indeed involve nuclear weapons, more so if it's the U.S. and Russia which catapulted it. She said the two countries' combined nuclear stockpiles already account for 94 per cent of all the 16,300 nuclear weapons in the world.

"There is no way a war between the United States and Russia could start and not go nuclear," she said. "The nuclear weapons, are sitting there, thousands of them. They are ready to be used."

In the last World War II, over 60 million people died. One million of these people died due to the use of two nuclear weapons, when the U.S. dropped nukes over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945.