The Arms Control Association’s annual meeting was scheduled to begin in Washington Thursday morning, with addresses from U.S. and U.N. officials planned throughout the proceedings, the disarmament-advocating group said.
The Washington-based non-government group was scheduled to hold the meeting at the National Press Club in Washington, a few blocks from the White House, beginning at 9:15 a.m. Eastern time. The meeting was to be live-streamed online.
Mallory Stewart, assistant secretary of state at the bureau of arms control, verification and compliance, was scheduled to give the meeting’s keynote address at 12 p.m. Eastern. Recorded greetings from Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Mass.) were also on tap.
Izumi Nakamitsu, the U.N.’s under-secretary-general and high representative for disarmament affairs, was scheduled to speak live at 2:15 p.m. Eastern time.
As the the Arms Control Association convened its annual meeting, nuclear arms control talks between the U.S. and Russia had frozen over amid Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the second time in less than a decade the federation invaded its western neighbor.
In a story published Wednesday in the New York Times, a senior official in the Joe Biden administration said it was “almost impossible” to imagine the U.S. and Russia resuming arms control talks before the bilateral New Start treaty limiting deployments of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons expires Feb. 4, 2026. One of Biden’s first acts in office was to extend the treaty to that date.
