MOSCOW: Russia on Wednesday said it was still awaiting a formal answer from Washington on President Vladimir Putin\u2019s proposal to jointly stick to the last remaining Russian-US arms control treaty, which expires in less than two months.<\/p>\n
New START, which runs out on February 5, caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.<\/p>\n
Putin in September offered to voluntarily maintain for one year the limits on deployed strategic nuclear weapons set out in the treaty, whose initials stand for the (New) Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.<\/p>\n
Trump said in October it sounded \u201clike a good idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have less than 100 days left before the expiry of New START,\u201d said Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia\u2019s powerful Security Council, which is like a modern-day politburo of Russia\u2019s most powerful officials.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are waiting for a response,\u201d Shoigu told reporters during a visit to Hanoi. He added that Moscow\u2019s proposal was an opportunity to halt the \u201cdestructive movement\u201d that currently existed in nuclear arms control.<\/p>\n
Nuclear arms control in peril<\/p>\n
Russia and the US together have more than 10,000 nuclear warheads, or 87 percent of the global inventory of nuclear weapons. China is the world\u2019s third largest nuclear power with about 600 warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists.<\/p>\n
The arms control treaties between Moscow and Washington were born out of fear of nuclear war after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Greater transparency about the opponent\u2019s arsenal was intended to reduce the scope for misunderstanding and slow the arms race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MOSCOW: Russia on Wednesday said it was still awaiting a formal answer from Washington on President Vladimir Putin\u2019s proposal to jointly stick to the last remaining Russian-US arms control treaty, which expires in less than two months. New START, which runs out on February 5, caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-519189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n