WASHINGTON — The Barack Obama administration’s National Nuclear Security Administration leadership duo whipped the Donald Trump administration here Tuesday to immediately extend the New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia and forget, for now, about modifying the pact.
The bilateral treaty, which limits Moscow and Washington to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 fielded delivery systems, will expire on Feb. 5, 2021, unless the presidents of the United States and the Russian Federation agree to extend it through Feb. 5, 2026.
The Trump administration has said it wants to either expand New START to include curbs on China’s nuclear arsenal and Russia’s nonstrategic warheads, or replace the accord with a new multilateral deal that does the same. China, which analysts estimate has far fewer nuclear weapons than the U.S. and Russia, has said it will not join any nuclear arms control treaty.
“It’s certainly a worthy goal and worthy objective from an arms control perspective to have the Chinese involved, but I think it’s going to take a lot longer than a year-and-a-half that’s left before the expiration of New START,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Frank Klotz, who led the NNSA from April 2014 to January 2018, said during a question-and-answer session after a breakfast speech hosted by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute.
“If you try to reopen and renegotiate the New START treaty in the time you have left, I think the chances of that happening are small to nil,” Klotz’s former top deputy at the NNSA, Madelyn Creedon, said during the same breakfast. “There’s not enough time. Look how long it took even to negotiate and ratify New START, which on its face was a fairly simple treaty and was still terribly contested” in the U.S. Senate.
White House national security adviser John Bolton, an avowed opponent of arms control agreements, has said the Trump administration is “unlikely” to extend New START.
