After weeks of reporting that Washington and Moscow might be close to a follow-on deal to or an extension of the landmark New START treaty, President Donald Trump’s lead arms-control negotiator is scheduled for a public talk today about China’s nuclear arsenal.
Unless the Trump administration and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, agree to extend New START, that pact, negotiated by the administration of President Barack Obama to limit deployments of long-range, city-busting nuclear weapons, will expire in February.
With the deadline looming, Marshall Billingslea, special presidential envoy for arms control at the State Department, is scheduled to headline a virtual Heritage Foundation event titled “Behind the Great Wall of Secrecy: China’s Nuclear Buildup.”
The hard-charging Billingslea is a politically polarizing figure, and Senate Democrats have twice dug their heels in, as a bloc, to oppose his nomination to a more senior State Department post.
Still, in the two weeks preceding the event, media have reported that Billingslea and Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, are closing in on an agreement that the White House hopes could be a precursor to a Trump white whale: a multilateral successor to New START that also binds China’s nuclear arsenal, plus Russian weapons not covered by the current bilateral treaty.
China has said it will not participate in nuclear arms-control talks, but the Trump administration has not given up hope that Russia might help bring Beijing to the table — after the U.S. and Russia settle on a New START extension that, according to media reports, might come with new strings attached, such as a broader warhead freeze.
New START limits Washington and Moscow to 1,500 deployed strategic warheads on no more than 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers. The parties could extend the treaty for up to another five years.
Congress has little power to sway the President’s decision, except by withholding funding for certain White House prerogatives — a tactic the GOP-controlled Senate has not allowed in any of the must-pass bills poised to clear the legislature between now and inauguration day.
Without an extension, the exchange of data under New START published on Oct. 1 by the State Department could be the last.
On that day, the State Department published a fact sheet that showed the U.S. and Russia remained below New START’s prescribed limits of 1,550 or fewer warheads on a combination of no more than 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers.
Russia had 1,447 treaty-limited warheads, while the U.S. had 1,457. The U.S. spread its deployed strategic warheads — loosely speaking, weapons designed to strike an adversary’s home territory en masse and destroy its capability to wage war and recover from a nuclear strike — across more missiles and bombs than Russia, according to the latest State Department fact sheet.
