<span style="color: #222222;">Russia today said that the United States was ramping up military tensions by testing a medium-range cruise missile weeks after tearing up a pact with Russia. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, the US has obviously taken a course towards escalation of military tensions. </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"><br />'' Earlier, the US Defence Department has announced that the test of a medium-range ground-launched cruise missile from the US Navy controlled San Nicolas Island off the coast of Los Angeles, California. The Pentagon said in a statement that the test missile exited its ground mobile launcher and accurately hit its target after more than 500 kilometres of flight.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"><br />'' While the missile was described as conventionally configured, meaning not nuclear equipped, the launch was a sign of Washington beefing up its nuclear war fighting capabilities in the wake of the collapse of the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on 2nd August.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"><br />'' The INF treaty bans all land based missiles, conventional and nuclear, that can travel between 500 and 5500 km, in an effort to abolish nuclear arms race between United States and Russia.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"><br />''<br />''Secretary of Defence Mark Esper has already expressed that the US was no longer bound by the INF treaty and had already begun work to develop mobile, conventional, ground-launched cruise and ballistic missile systems. </span><br />