Moscow and Washington held talks in 2019 on the possibility of limiting nuclear arms, according to the US president
US President Donald Trump has said he hopes to hold talks with Russia and China about reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles. According to Trump, the idea of denuclearization was previously backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump made the remarks on Thursday during an address via video link to the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
Recalling talks he had with Putin ahead of the 2020 US election about denuclearization, Trump said “I can tell you that President Putin wanted to do it, he and I wanted to do it.”
“We had a good conversation with China, they would have been involved, and that would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet,” he added.
Trump also pointed to the expense of keeping up America’s nuclear arsenal as a motivating factor behind the idea to limit how many weapons are deployed.
“Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about,” he said.
In May 2019, Trump told reporters he and Putin had discussed the possibility of a new accord limiting nuclear arms that could eventually include China, in what would be a major deal between the world’s top three atomic powers.
That meeting was held as the ‘New START’ treaty – the only arms control pact between Moscow and Washington that required them to cut their deployed strategic nuclear warheads to the lowest level in decades – was about to expire in February 2021. The treaty was extended for five years to expire in 2026.
However, Russia formally suspended its participation in the treaty in 2023 due to Washington’s military support for Ukraine. Moscow then said it would continue to abide by the limits set out in the treaty.
Since then, the Kremlin has warned that a continued US military buildup near its borders and the deployment of nuclear-capable missiles globally could trigger a proportional response.
Moscow has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, though Russian officials, including Putin, have repeatedly stated that they consider the use of such weapons to be a “last resort.”
Last year, Russia announced updates to its nuclear doctrine after the US and several Western nations allowed Ukraine to use foreign-made long-range weapons for strikes deep into Russia. The revised doctrine now states that aggression by a non-nuclear state or by a group of states supported by a nuclear state, could be viewed as a “joint attack” on Russia.
