The Kremlin is open to a one-year extension of the New START nuclear arms control treaty, but not on the terms the White House has proposed, according to a widely translated Russian-language statement from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
“I have a proposal, namely: to extend the existing Treaty without any conditions for at least a year in order to be able to conduct meaningful negotiations on all parameters of the problems that are governed by agreements of this kind,” Putin told senior Russian officials on a video conference posted online Friday.
That appeared to complete the collapse the “gentleman’s agreement” between Putin’s and Trump’s governments touted earlier this week by Marshall Billingslea, the White House’s top nuclear arms control negotiator and the U.S. point person for New START talks.
In a webcast address Tuesday, Billingslea, called on the arms control community to publicly back the White House’s drive to condition a New START extension on a verifiable freeze in deployment of all nuclear warheads, even those not covered by the bilateral agreement.
Robert O’Brien, the U.S. national security advisor, clarified in a public meeting on Friday that the U.S. was seeking a one-year extension in exchange for the warhead freeze.
“I think it’s important for the arms control establishment to also step up,” Billingslea, the special presidential envoy for arms control, said Tuesday in a webcast presentation hosted by the Washington-based Heritage Group non-profit. “Now is the time for the myriad of arms control experts that we have out there to register their voice with the Russians [and say] ‘take the deal.’”
At least one arms control group did exactly the opposite. The D.C.-based, disarmament-advocating Arms Control Association on Friday called on Trump to accept at least an unconditional one-year extension, and perhaps an unconditional five-year extension, as allowed under the treaty. The pact will expire Feb. 4, without action by Trump and Putin.
As reported by media earlier in the week, Billingslea said Tuesday that the U.S. and Russia had a “gentleman’s agreement” to extend New START “for some period” at “the highest levels of our two governments,” and that the deal needed to “percolate down through their systems so that my counterpart hopefully will be authorized to negotiate.”
But that deal started to disintegrate in near-real-time minutes after Billingslea’s remarks.
The U.S. offer as propounded by Billingslea was “unacceptable,” Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister told the Moscow-affiliated Sputnik news agency in a story that ran not even an hour after Billingslea made his public push for the Trump administration’s deal.
Ryabkov later issued a more detailed statement on Twitter.
1/2DFM S.#Ryabkov: 💬We are well aware of #US position on freeze and it’s unacceptable for us as this needs to be tackled together w/ other #StrategicStability issues – delivery vehicles,space, US-made missile defense & their growing nonnuclear strategic offensive arms arsenals pic.twitter.com/eps8yl3hyB
— Russian Mission Vienna (@mission_rf) October 14, 2020
New START limits the U.S. and the Russian Federation to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on a mixture of 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers. The U.S. and Russian presidents could extend the treaty, negotiated by the Barack Obama administration, for up to another five years.
The Donald Trump administration wants to replace, or at least follow up, New START with a multilateral nuclear arms control deal that also constrains China’s growing nuclear arsenal, plus Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons — relatively small nukes intended to turn the tide of a military conflict, rather than obliterate an adversary’s ability to wage war or recover from a nuclear strike.
Billingslea also sought to enlist the arms-control community for help with that objective, telling non-government and former government experts to “call on the Chinese to sit down, negotiate and come up with something constructive to say.”
China has said it will not participate in such negotiations with the U.S. and Russia. Billingslea says that would constitute a violation of China’s obligation under the U.N. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to pursue negotiations that could lead to nuclear disarmament.
