A State Department official said on Tuesday that he wasn’t aware of any informal understanding between the US and Russia on maintaining the limits imposed by New START, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the two powers that expired earlier this month.
New START limited the number of warheads each side can deploy to 1,550, and the number of deployed and non-deployed strategic launchers to 800.
Before New START expired, Russia proposed maintaining the limits for another year to make room for diplomacy to reach an agreement on a replacement treaty, but the US didn’t accept the offer, and since its expiration, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow would continue to abide by the New START limits if Washington did as well.
Christopher Yeaw, the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Arms Control and Nonproliferation at the State Department, was asked on Tuesday if there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” on maintaining the New START limits and said, “I know of no such agreement. And that is still in the President’s hands.”
So far, there’s no sign that the US or Russia has increased nuclear deployments following the end of New START, but for the first time since the Cold War, there are no longer any constraints on the arsenals of the world’s largest nuclear-armed powers.
The Trump administration’s position is that any new arms control treaty must include China, though Beijing opposes trilateral arms control with the US and Russia, as its nuclear arsenal is much smaller. Chinese officials have previously said they wouldn’t join arms control negotiations with the US and Russia unless the two powers significantly reduced their nuclear stockpiles.
Yeaw acknowledged that it would be “difficult” to get China involved. “The president certainly wants China in this agreement. I don’t know exactly the path that we will take to get there,” he said.
