Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday reaffirmed the Trump administration’s disinterest in renewing a strictly bilateral U.S.-Russian New START nuclear arms control treaty past its expiration in February 2021.
As Trump and other officials have previously, Pompeo indicated China must be brought into the nuclear arms-control fold.
“President Trump will never allow America to enter into any arms control agreement that doesn’t make sense for the United States of America or to renew any existing arms control agreement that expires if it no longer makes sense for America,” Pompeo said during a media availability at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “So with that – with that as the central core principle, we – the president has spoken deeply about how the world has changed since New START was originally created. We now have an expanded threat from the Chinese Communist Party.”
Signed by then-Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, New START limits the United States and Russia to deployment of no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads on 700 fielded ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers. The treaty will expire a decade from its February 2011 entry into force, but can be extended for up to five years.
“The president’s made clear that any time we begin to have a conversation about how to create a strategic – a strategic structure that secures America, it’s no longer the case that it can only be the United States and Russia,” according to Pompeo.
His comments drew quick criticism from arms control advocates. China currently has no strategic nuclear assets in the field, tweeted Vipin Narang, a security studies professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“So yeah if you ask Beijing to join and they say ‘sure thing Mike, we will go to 1550 too’….better for US security? Really?” he wrote. “This line is just a poison pill excuse to avoid extending New START, plain and simple.”
