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Nuclear arms meeting planned, USA and Russia, – arms control expert is not enthusiastic

US and Russia to meet for nuclear arms negotiations this month Jennifer Hansler, CNN June 8, 2020 Washington  US and Russian officials will meet later this month for nuclear arms negotiations, a top US arms control official announced Monday.
Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Marshall Billingslea said that he and his Russian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, have agreed “on time and place for nuclear arms negotiations in June.”
The Trump administration has abandoned a number of key arms control pacts, most recently the Open Skies Treaty, in favor of seeking a three-party agreement with Russia and China. The insistence on a trilateral agreement is widely seen as a way to scuttle New START, the nuclear reduction treaty between the US and Russia that is set to expire in February 2021. Beijing has dismissed calls to participate in trilateral talks……
Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, said it is unclear what incentive China would have to join the talks, given the disproportionate size of its nuclear arsenal in comparison to that of Russia and the US. The latter two countries “possess about 85% of the world’s nuclear weapons” — “more than 10 times the deployed number of strategic nuclear warheads as China, Britain and France combined,” he said.
Moreover, Kimball noted that the administration’s escalated rhetoric toward China amid the coronavirus pandemic will not have helped bring them to the table……
Kimball told CNN that the US and Russia meeting to discuss nuclear arms control matters is “good, but this is no reason to celebrate because the Trump administration’s position seems to remain the same.”
“They’re refusing to pick up Russia’s offer to extend New START,” he said, referencing “They appear to be still demanding new agreements that can’t be negotiated before New START expires, not only with Russia, but with China. So, I’m not jumping up and down for joy.”…….
In his remarks at the Hudson Institute, Billingslea said that the administration hoped to avoid “an unnecessarily expensive buildup in a three ways arms racing context” between the US, China and Russia, but warned that the US was prepared to “spend into oblivion” to beat them……… https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/us-russia-arms-control-talks/index.html

June 8, 2020 - Posted by | politics international, weapons and war

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