The United States wants to broaden its main nuclear arms control agreement with Russia to include all their atomic weapons, a U.S. envoy said on Tuesday after talks with Moscow on a new accord. U.S. special presidential envoy for arms control Marshall Billingslea also said Washington would keep pressing China to join the talks on replacing the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which expires in February. "We, the United States, intend and believe … that the next arms control agreement must cover all nuclear weapons, not just so-called strategic nuclear weapons," he told a news conference in Vienna that followed the talks there on Monday. 'We are running out of time'New START caps the countries' deployed strategic nuclear weapons warheads at 1,550 each, far fewer than the thousands of atomic weapons they possess. A more comprehensive agreement would be intended to overcome such disputes and avoid further erosion of the global arms control architecture.

Source: CBC News June 23, 2020 14:37 UTC