The U.S. Senate has confirmed former Pentagon and State Department career man Jeffrey Eberhardt to be special representative of the president for nuclear nonproliferation.
In his new State Department job, for which he was confirmed last month, Eberhardt will be the Trump administration’s central figure in talks over international nonproliferation agreements, including for the 2020 Review Conference of the landmark Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Review conferences are held every five years to assess the functioning of the nonproliferation regime set by the 1968 accord.
An experienced arms-control hand, the Russian-speaking Eberhardt was most recently director of the Office of Multilateral and Nuclear Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance.
In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, Eberhardt said Iran was not doing a good job fulfilling its obligations as a non-nuclear-weapon-state member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Eberhardt ascends to his new role as the United States is only a month away from officially leaving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that prohibits deployment of medium-range, ground-launched missiles by the U.S. and Russia.
The United States is also on the threshold of allowing the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) to expire. The pact, negotiated in the first term of then-President Barack Obama, went into effect in 2011 and expires in 2021. The deal caps deployed Russia and U.S. strategic warheads — those not intended purely for battlefield use — at 1,550.
The presidents of the U.S. and Russia can opt to extend New START to February 2026. John Bolton, the White House’s rigidly hawkish national security adviser, in June told media he believes it is “unlikely” that President Donald Trump will extend the treaty.
The U.S. had 1,365 deployed strategic warheads as of March 1, while Russia had 1,461 as of that date. That is respectively down from 1,398 warheads and up from 1,420 warheads since the last official count, the State Department announced this week.
The State Department releases tallies of U.S. and Russian deployed strategic warheads every six months, under New START.
