The US says it wants a new nuclear deal with Russia but with China involved – National
Russian and American negotiators discussed the expiration of the last remaining nuclear agreement between the two countries and agreed on the need to quickly launch new arms control talks, the Kremlin said on Friday.
At the same time, the US stressed the need for China to join a future arms deal and accused Beijing of secret nuclear weapons tests.
The New START treaty expired on Thursday, leaving nothing in the two major nuclear arsenals for the first time in more than a century and fueling fears of an unrestrained nuclear arms race.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had announced that he was ready to stick to the terms of the agreement for another year if Washington followed suit. But US President Donald Trump has said he wants China to be part of the new deal, and his administration has stepped up pressure by accusing Beijing of conducting nuclear bomb tests. Beijing has dismissed the allegations and rejected attempts to join the non-alignment treaty.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reiterated that China should participate in a possible new nuclear deal. “An arms control system that excludes China’s construction, sponsored by Russia, will undoubtedly leave the United States and our allies safe,” he said.
Russian and American negotiators discussed future nuclear weapons control in the United Arab Emirates, where representatives of Russia, Ukraine and the US held two days of talks on peace talks in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
“There is an understanding, and they talked about it in Abu Dhabi, that both sides will take positions of responsibility and both sides see the need to start negotiations on this issue as soon as possible,” he said.
Asked to comment on an Axios report that says Russian and US negotiators have negotiated an informal agreement to observe the treaty’s limits for at least six months, Peskov responded that any such extension would only be formal.
“It is difficult to imagine any informal expansion in this sector,” he said.
The US wants China involved
Trump has indicated that he would like to maintain limits on nuclear weapons but wants to include China in a potential new deal.
In his first term, Trump tried and failed to push for a three-way nuclear deal involving China. Beijing has refused to impose any limits on its small but growing nuclear arsenal, while urging the US to resume nuclear talks with Russia.
Rubio said the US is “pursuing all means” to achieve Trump’s “desire for a world with fewer of these evil weapons,” but stressed that Washington will not stand by when Russia and China increase their nuclear capabilities.
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“As of 2020, China has increased its nuclear arsenal from the low 200s to more than 600 and is on track to have more than 1,000 weapons by 2030,” Rubio wrote on Substack.
Thomas DiNanno, the top US arms control official, said on Friday that the expiration of the last nuclear agreement between Russia and the US marked the “end of an era” of what he described as “US collective deterrence.” He said Trump wanted a “better deal” involving Beijing.
“As we sit here today, all of China’s nuclear weapons are unrestricted, secretive, undeclared and uncontrolled,” DiNanno told the Conference on Disarmament, a UN-backed organization, in Geneva.
DiNanno also accused Beijing of secretly conducting nuclear tests. “Today, I can reveal that the US government knows that China has conducted nuclear weapons tests, including preparing tests with a fixed yield of hundreds of tons,” he said.
DiNanno said the Chinese military “wanted to cover up the test by disrupting the nuclear explosion because it sees these tests as violating the test ban obligations.”
The comments follow US statements accusing Beijing of secretly conducting nuclear tests.
China’s ambassador Shen Jian dismissed what he called “fake news and baseless accusations by the United States,” saying “we abide by our obligation to stop nuclear weapons testing.”
“The US’s push to expand China’s nuclear arsenal is actually aimed at shifting its responsibility for denuclearization and looking for an excuse to develop nuclear power,” Shen said.
He said that “for now, China will not participate in nuclear disarmament talks” because its nuclear power is “not equal to that of the United States or Russia.”
Shen said Beijing regretted the expiration of New START and urged the US to accept Moscow’s offer to stick to the treaty’s limits and resume nuclear talks with Russia.
In October, Trump spoke of US intentions to resume nuclear tests for the first time since 1992, but US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the following month that such tests would not include nuclear explosions.
After Trump’s statement, the US Chargé d’Affaires to the International Organizations in Vienna, Howard Solomon, announced that “the United States will begin joint inspections with other nuclear-armed states.” He noted that the US has raised concerns that Russia and China have not followed through on a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.
He was referring to so-called critical nuclear test explosions banned under the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, known as the CTBT, in which fissile material is pressurized to start a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction that causes an explosion.
The monitoring network has registered all six of North Korea’s nuclear tests, but cannot detect the most low-yield nuclear tests conducted underground in steel chambers, experts say.
Robert Floyd, secretary general of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization that monitors the implementation of the global ban, said in a statement on Friday that its monitoring system “did not detect any incident consistent with the characteristics of a nuclear test explosion” on June 22, 2020, when the US said that China secretly conducted a nuclear test.
New START, signed in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, was the latest in a long line of agreements between Moscow and Washington to limit their nuclear arsenals, beginning with SALT I in 1972.
New START limited each side to no more than 1,550 nuclear missiles and 700 bombs deployed and ready for use. It was supposed to expire in 2021 but was extended for five years.
The agreement envisioned sweeping on-site inspections to ensure compliance, although it was suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and never resumed.
In February 2023, Putin suspended Moscow’s participation, saying that Russia would not allow US testing of its nuclear sites at a time when Washington and its NATO allies publicly announced that they wanted Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine. But the Kremlin has reiterated that it is not pulling out of the deal entirely, pledging to respect its nuclear arsenal.
In September, Putin offered to keep the New START restrictions in place for another year to buy time for the two sides to negotiate a successor agreement.
Even as New START expires, the US and Russia agreed on Thursday to re-establish military-to-military dialogue following a meeting between senior officials from both sides in Abu Dhabi, the commander of US forces in Europe said. Contacts were suspended in 2021 as relations grew strained before Russia sent troops to Ukraine in February 2022.
Keaten reported from Geneva. Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Stephanie Liechtenstein in Vienna contributed.
