The United States and Russia resume negotiations in Vienna on nuclear arms control on Monday, threatened from the start by Washington's insistence on including China, which Beijing refuses. Ambassador Marshall Billingslea, President’s Representative for Disarmament Affairs, and Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Riabkov are to discuss the 2010 New Start bilateral treaty, which expires on February 5, 2021 - just after the end of the current term of Donald Trump, candidate for re-election in November. According to a diplomat interviewed by AFP, the dialogue must take place at the Niederösterreich Palace, in the center of the Austrian capital. It could take place over several days.
The terms of New Start, part of the progressive disarmament provided for in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) of 1968, limit the number of strategic nuclear launchers to 700 and the number of nuclear warheads to 1,550. Moscow has been asking for talks on its renewal since the end of 2019, but the Trump administration has so far made the inclusion of Beijing in the talks a prerequisite. "Our biggest problem is China's lack of transparency ," Robert Wood, the US representative to the Geneva disarmament conference, told CBS on Friday. “The Chinese arsenal will double in the next ten years. This of course worries us a lot, ” he added.
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"We believe that the extension of New Start would be correct and logical, but the world is not only about this treaty," Interfax M.Riabkov told news agency on Saturday. Russia and the United States still hold more than 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons, according to the latest report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). Washington has in 2020 some 5,800 nuclear warheads and Moscow of 6,375, against 320 for Beijing, 290 for Paris and 215 for London, according to the Swedish institute.
China, which considers that its arsenal is still much lower, refuses to participate in tripartite negotiations but has shown itself open to multilateral discussions. "The United States should drastically reduce its stocks, which would create the conditions for other nuclear powers to join multilateral talks , " the Chinese foreign ministry recently tweeted. Song Zhongping, a Chinese defense expert, estimates that the ideal level for Beijing would be 2,000 nuclear warheads. "China will never participate in disarmament negotiations between the United States and Russia," he told AFP.
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"The Trump administration has no plans to extend New Start at this stage and seeks to use China's disinterest in trilateral negotiations as a cynical excuse" to abandon the treaty, director Daryl Kimball told AFP from the independent American organization Arms Control Association. Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from three international disarmament agreements: the Iranian nuclear agreement, the INF treaty on medium-range land missiles and the Open Skies Treaty on verification of military movements and arms limitation.
For Russian political analyst Fyodor Loukianov, "we should not expect any progress" in Vienna. "The Trump administration is waiving virtually all of the restrictions associated with past deals ," he told AFP. "There is no indication that this treaty will be an exception . " For Shannon Kile, director of the Nuclear Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Program at SIPRI, "the era of bilateral nuclear arms control agreements between Russia and the United States may be coming to an end . "
