President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged the importance of nuclear arms control in a joint press conference following their one-on-one meeting in Helsinki Monday, though neither committed to an extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
Of the two heads of state, Putin came the closest to actually addressing the state of the nearly 10 year-old New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) his notional predecessor, Dmitri Medvedev, signed with Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, in 2010.
“[I]t is crucial that we fine-tune the stability and global security and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” Putin said through a translator. “This includes the extension of a strategic offensive arms limitation treaty.”
Trump did not mention or allude to the treaty, but told assembled members of the press that “nuclear proliferation … is the most important thing we [the U.S. and Russia] can be working on,” and that “representatives from our national security councils will need to follow up” on the informal discussions about nuclear weapons he and Putin apparently had behind closed doors in the Finnish capital.
New START required the U.S. and Russia to cap deployed long-range warheads and delivery mechanisms at certain levels by Feb. 5 of this year. The U.S. and Russia have already met their New START nuclear reduction obligations. The treaty remains in force until Feb. 5, 2021.
New START is a successor to the START treaty signed by then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush and then-Soviet-President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.
New START treaty limits are: 700 deployed intercontinental- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers; 1,550 fielded strategic warheads; and 800 deployed and nondeployed long-range launchers.
On July 6, a little more than a week before the two presidents met, the U.S. State Department reported the U.S. reduced its deployed warheads slightly, compared with the previous count in February.
