US President Donald Trump yesterday rejected an offer from his Russian counterpart to voluntarily extend the caps on strategic nuclear weapons deployments after the treaty that held them in check for more than two decades expired.
“Rather than extend “New START ... we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved and modernised Treaty that can last long into the future,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Trump was responding to a proposal by Russian President Vladimir Putin for the sides to adhere for a year to the limits set by the 2010 accord on deployments of strategic nuclear warheads and the missiles, aircraft and submarines that carry them.
New START was the last arms control treaty between the world’s two largest nuclear weapons powers. It allowed for only a single extension, which Putin and former US President Joe Biden agreed to for five years in 2021.
Earlier, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was still ready to engage in dialogue with the US if Washington responded constructively to Putin’s proposal.
“Listen, if there are any constructive replies, of course we will conduct a dialogue,” Peskov told reporters.
New START was the last in a series of nuclear agreements between Moscow and Washington dating back more than half a century to the Cold War.
Besides setting numerical limits on weapons, they included inspection regimes experts say served to build a level of trust and confidence between the nuclear adversaries, helping make the world safer. If nothing replaces the treaty, security analysts see a more dangerous environment with a higher risk of miscalculation. Forced to rely on worst-case assumptions about the other’s intentions, the US and Russia would see an incentive to increase their arsenals, especially as China plays catch-up with its own rapid nuclear build-up.
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