#new-start

#new-start

The expiration of the New START treaty this week, which capped the amount of nuclear warheads that the two sides could deploy on bombers, submarines, and missiles, will reduce the degree oftransparency between Washington and Moscow at a moment of high tension in Europe. Without the verification processes and formal exchanges, like site visits, defense planners will find themselves in the dark.

The United States' top nuclear arms official on Friday accused China of carrying out an undisclosed nuclear detonation in 2020, arguing that recent secretive underground tests by China and Russia have given Washington reason to conduct "parallel steps" as a decades-long moratorium on nuclear testing among major powers is unraveling.

Let's be honest: America needs another nuclear weapon about as much as Donald Trump deserves a Nobel peace prize. Yet on Thursday, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U S and Russia will expire. When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty New Start goes away, there will be no limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time in more than 50 years. That is very bad news.

For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the two states that possess the overwhelming majority of the global stockpile of nuclear weapons, Guterres said in a statement on Wednesday. He said New Start and other arms control treaties had drastically improved the security of all peoples.

The first such arrangement can be found in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement (SALT-I), signed in 1972. The New START agreement limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 each, and the number of strategic delivery vehicles and systems such as heavy bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) to 800 each. It also contains provisions for mutual inspections to verify the treaty is being upheld.