President Donald Trump said he would like to hold nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China after conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine are resolved.
The chief motivation would be to find ways to save money, Trump said on February 13 at the White House, lamenting the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in rebuilding the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
“There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”
The Congressional Budget Office in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term as president, forecast that the U.S. modernization program would cost $1.3 trillion over several decades.
All three countries are “spending a lot of money" on their nuclear programs that could be spent on "things that are actually, hopefully much more productive," Trump said, speaking to reporters at the White House.
Trump said he would like hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin and get to commitments to cut their own spending on nuclear weapons.
“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to.”
Trump said he would look to engage in talks with the two countries on denuclearization “once we straighten it all out" in the Middle East and Ukraine.
While the U.S. and Russia have held massive stockpiles of weapons since the Cold War, China has far fewer, but Trump predicted that it would catch up in five to six years.
SEE ALSO: UNGA Debates Disarmament After Putin Proposes Revisions To Russian Nuclear DoctrineThe United States once had multiple nuclear arms treaties with Russia, but only one, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, remains. It caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy at 1,550 each and limits the number of deployed strategic delivery systems at 700. It also provides for a verification regime.
Russia warned this week that the outlook for extending the New START did not look promising. The treaty is due to run out on February 5, 2026.
Trump made a failed attempt late in his first term to negotiate limits on other categories of nuclear weapons and to add China to the treaty.
Russia has about 5,800 nuclear warheads, including retired stocks waiting to be dismantled, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). The United States has 5,044 and China about 500. Some nuclear missiles carry multiple warheads.
After a steady decline since the 1980s, the global stockpile of warheads is increasing again, according to FAS. The main driver is China, which experts say seeks to boost its warheads to 1,500 by 2035.
“The bipolar nuclear order -- led by the United States and Russia -- has given way to a more volatile tripolar one,” the Center for a New American Strategy, wrote in a February 13 report.
The Kremlin launched a new, experimental ballistic missile into Ukraine last year after Washington approved Kyiv’s use of long-range weapons into Russia. It was part of nuclear saber rattling by Putin.
Putin last year widened the scope of Russia’s nuclear doctrine. It previously said Russia may use nuclear weapons in case of a nuclear attack by an enemy or a conventional attack that threatens the existence of the state.
The revised version says that Russia may use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack posing a “critical threat to our sovereignty,” Putin said.
It also proposed that aggression against Russia by any nonnuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state be considered a joint attack on Russia.
The change follows Putin’s warning to the United States and other NATO allies that allowing Ukraine to use Western-supplied longer-range weapons to hit Russian territory would mean that Russia and NATO would be at war.