Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said the insistence on including China showed the Trump administration was not serious about an accord. “The only conclusion I can come to is that… the Trump administration [does] not intend to extend New Start and is seeking to display China’s disinterest in trilateral arms control talks as a cynical excuse to allow New Start to expire,” Kimball said. US Ambassador Marshall Billingslea and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov are nonetheless to discuss the future of the New Start treaty, which was agreed in 2010 and expires in February 2021. The deadlock over New Start and the demise of other nuclear arms control treaties “suggest that the era of bilateral nuclear arms control agreements between Russia and the USA might be coming to an end,” said Shannon Kile of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. According to the institute’s latest research, Russia has 6,375 nuclear warheads, including those that are not deployed, and the United States has 5,800.

Source: Manila Times June 22, 2020 16:17 UTC