US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that any nuclear deal with Russia needs to include China, hours before the historic New START treaty between Washington and Moscow was to expire.
“The president’s been clear in the past that to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile,” he said on Wednesday.
China’s nuclear arsenal is growing quickly, but is still well below the levels of Russia and the United States.
Trump, in his first term, also looked ready to let New START lapse as he insisted on including China.
Joe Biden agreed with Russia to extend New START for five years after he defeated Trump in the 2020 election, but tensions between the two countries later deteriorated over the Ukraine war.
The treaty, signed in 2010 by then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and his US counterpart Barack Obama, limited each side’s nuclear arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, a reduction of nearly 30 percent from the previous limit set in 2002.
It also allowed both sides to carry out on-site inspections of the other’s nuclear arsenal, although these were suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic and have not resumed since.
In 2019, the two countries withdrew from the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which limited the use of medium-range missiles.