The United States and Russia are close to reaching an agreement to freeze the number of nuclear warheads in both countries and to extend the New START treaty, which expires early next year, for one year after Russia agreed to freeze the number of its nuclear warheads, according to senior U.S. government officials. This will create diplomatic fallout for President Donald Trump, who is seeking re-election before the U.S. presidential election.
“Now that Russia has agreed to freeze its nuclear warheads, I don’t see why we should be able to do anything about it,” the Wall Street Journal reported on 20 March, quoting a senior Trump administration official as saying, “We are very, very close to an agreement. The remaining issues cannot be resolved in the next few days.” U.S. officials said the remaining issues to be resolved by the two sides include verification numbers and defining nuclear warheads.
The New START treaty, which entered into force on Feb. 5, 2011, has a 10-year term and will expire early next year. The agreement binds the two countries to deploy no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads, 800 launch vehicles, and limits on the number of deployed intercontinental and submarine-launched missiles.
The Trump administration has been pressuring Russia to agree on an extension of the treaty before the Nov. 3 election, which would allow Trump to deliver a major foreign policy achievement in the final sprint before the vote.
On the 16th, the two sides disagreed on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for an unconditional one-year extension of the treaty, which the White House said must be accompanied by a freeze on the number of nuclear warheads; on the 20th, the Russian Foreign Ministry suddenly indicated that Russia was willing to agree to what the United States had been insisting on all along, a freeze on the number of nuclear warheads in exchange for a one-year extension of the treaty, but that the United States must also freeze.
The U.S.-Russian agreement to extend the treaty for one year was an attempt to buy time to negotiate a new, broader treaty to replace New START, and Trump argued that China should be included in the new treaty negotiations to avoid a costly trilateral arms race among the three countries.
Marshall Billingslea, the Trump administration’s special envoy on arms control, told a Washington think tank seminar last week that the U.S. continues to insist that China must participate in an arms control treaty and that “any agreement we reach with Russia must be based on a framework that ultimately brings China to the table, that extends the agreement to China.
But China has refused to join. China’s deputy representative to the UN, Geng Shuang, told the UN General Assembly’s Disarmament and International Security Committee that China’s nuclear forces are indistinguishable from those of the United States and Russia, and have always been “at the lowest level required for national security,” criticizing the U.S. for asking China to join as a distraction.
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