Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to suspend his country’s involvement in the last remaining arms control treaty with the U.S. came as a disturbing surprise to multiple former officials who negotiated the pact and nonproliferation experts committed to ending the expansion of nuclear forces.

For more than 50 years, the U.S. and Russia — the world’s two largest nuclear powers — have had some form of an agreement in place that capped their ability to produce or deploy nuclear weapons. Putin’s announcement that he was suspending participation in the New START Treaty could end that era, with some of those experts debating whether this could launch another Cold War-style arms race. Tensions between the two nations over the war in Ukraine only increases those concerns.

“Putin’s clearly trying to inject nuclear leverage into both Ukraine and his relationship with the United States,” said Jon Wolfsthal, who helped negotiate the New START Treaty in 2009 as a member of the National Security Council. “And that should worry a lot of people.”

While Putin maintained in his speech Tuesday that Russia would not be the first to use a nuclear weapon, Russia has rattled its nuclear saber multiple times since the start of the war, referencing its nuclear capabilities and threatening Ukraine’s nuclear power plantswith bombs and shells. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Tuesday that the U.S. is keeping a watchful eye on how the situation develops and is open to further talks.

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Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/putin-russia-suspension-new-start-treaty-means-rcna71549

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The U.S. is moving to withdraw from Open Skies, a 1992 treaty that allows NATO countries and Russia to surveil one another from the air to prevent the risk of military conflict.

Why it matters: This is the third major international defense agreement President Trump has abandoned, following the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. The fate of another highly consequential treaty, New START, remains in the balance.

How it happened: “Trump administration officials and some conservative lawmakers have long argued that the Russians have used the Open Skies accord to gather intelligence on U.S. sites while restricting access for Western overflights of Russian territory,” per WSJ.

What to watch: New START, the last treaty constraining the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, is due to expire in February.

• Marshall Billingslea, Trump’s arms control envoy, announced talks with Russia today aimed at bringing China into a new trilateral agreement.
• But he expressed skepticism that Russia could be trusted to comply with any treaty, and he would not discuss the idea of extending New START before the Feb. 5 deadline without Chinese participation.
• “We know how to win these races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion. If we have to, we will, but we sure would like to avoid it,” Billingslea said in a discussion hosted by the Hudson Institute.
  

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  Source: https://www.axios.com/new-start-treaty-trump-billingslea-arms-control-545981be-3edb-47df-8751-9b70848f5422.html

  [Disclaimer]

The post Trump to pull U.S. out of Open Skies treaty, leaves New START in limbo first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.