New START Must Be Extended, With or Without China

Daryl Kimball

Security, Americas

The baffling non-answers from the senior administration officials strongly suggest that the president’s impulse for a grand U.S.-Chinese-Russian arms control bargain is not backed up with a realistic plan.

On May 14, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Sochi, Russia to discuss what the State Department called a “new era” in “arms control to address new and emerging threats” with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin.

The trip follows reports that Donald Trump has directed his administration to seek a new arms control agreement with Russia and China that should include: “all the weapons, all the warheads, and all the missiles.”

U.S. officials, including National Security Advisor John Bolton, have criticized the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) because it only limits U.S. and Russian deployed strategic nuclear weapons and does not cover Russia’s stockpile of sub-strategic warheads in central storage inside Russia.

New START, which caps each side’s enormous and devastating long-range nuclear weapons to no more than 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 deployed strategic missiles and bombers, will expire in February 2021 if Trump and Putin don’t agree to an extension.

Russia has said it is ready to begin talks on a five-year extension of the treaty. The Trump administration, which has been conducting an interagency review of the treaty for over a year, is still undecided on whether to maintain or discard the agreement.

After his meeting in Sochi with Lavrov, Pompeo said they had agreed that their respective “teams will begin to work not only on New START and its potential extension but on a broader range of arms control issues that each of our two nations have in our shared best interests in achieving agreement on.”

At first glance, a broader nuclear arms control deal with Russia and China may sound promising. But the Trump administration does not appear to have the capacity to negotiate such a far-reaching agreement, which would be complex and would take years to conclude even if all sides were interested—and not all of them are.

Agreement on the extension of New START, which will be difficult enough, should be the first step forward.

On May 6, and before he set off for Sochi, Pompeo acknowledged that a trilateral deal involving China and that covers all types of U.S. and Russia nuclear weapons might be “too ambitious," noting "there’s just a couple years left before New START expires. It may be that we have to do that on a bilateral basis.”

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