LONDON/WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – The United States and Russia could embark on an unrestrained nuclear arms race for the first time since the Cold War, unless they reach an eleventh-hour deal before their last remaining arms control treaty expires in less than a week. The New START treaty is set to end on February 5. Without it, there would be no constraints on long-range nuclear arsenals for the first time since Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed two historic agreements in 1972 on the first-ever trip by a U.S. president to Moscow.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he would reveal his pick to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on FridayRussian President Vladimir Putin has proposed the two sides should stick to existing missile and warhead limits for one more year to buy time to work out what comes next, but U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to formally respond.
Trump said this month that “if it expires, it expires”, and that the treaty should be replaced with a better one.Some U.S. politicians argue Trump should reject Putin’s offer, freeing Washington to grow its arsenal to counter a rapid nuclear build-up by a third power: China.
Trump says he wants to pursue “denuclearisation” with both Russia and China. But Beijing says it is unreasonable to expect it to join disarmament talks with two countries whose arsenals are still far larger than its own.
WHY DO NUCLEAR TREATIES MATTER?
Since the darkest Cold War days when the United States and the Soviet Union threatened each other with “mutually assured destruction” in the event of nuclear war, both have seen arms limitation treaties as a way to prevent either a lethal misunderstanding or an economically ruinous arms race.
The treaties not only set numerical limits on missiles and warheads, they also require the sides to share information – a critical channel to “try to understand where the other side is coming from and what their concerns and drivers are”, said Darya Dolzikova at the RUSI think-tank in London.
With no new treaty, each would be forced to act according to worst-case assumptions about the weapons the other is producing, testing and deploying, said Nikolai Sokov, a former Soviet and Russian arms negotiator.
“It’s a self-sustaining kind of process. And of course, if you’ve got an unregulated arms race, things will get quite destabilising,” he said.
NEW TREATY NO SIMPLE TASK
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia and the United States have repeatedly replaced and updated the Cold War-era treaties that limited the so-called strategic weapons they point at each other’s cities and bases. The most recent, New START, was signed in 2010 by U.S. President Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin ally who was then serving as Russian president for four years.
