Will there be a new arms race between the US and Russia and China?

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Photo: Getty

April 8 marks the ninth anniversary of the signing of the New START Treaty between then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and his US counterpart Barack Obama. The 2010 New START Treaty expires on February 5, 2021, with an option to extend it until 2026.

However, according to experts, current President Donald Trump or National Security Advisor John Bolton do not want to extend the treaty when it expires in 2021. Visiting professor Subrata Ghoshroy from the Tokyo Institute of Technology said that, based on the budget plan, the future of extending the treaty looks bleak.

“Given the massive budget plans for the US nuclear weapons program over the next 30 years, we could see the re-emergence of a dangerous arms race with Russia and China,” said Mr. Ghoshroy.

Ghoshroy, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also said that if START is not extended, this will be the first time in more than 50 years that the world no longer has any restrictions on the thousands of nuclear weapons that currently exist.

“The consequences of not extending the START treaty would mean we would enter a period of great uncertainty in nuclear stability,” Mr. Ghoshroy stressed.

President Trump still has a chance to find a way to save START, and his escape from charges of collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election campaign gives him the freedom to do so, the expert noted.

Mr. Ghoshroy emphasized that President Trump's decision to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has created a hostile political and diplomatic atmosphere, making it difficult to extend START.

According to this expert, the collapse of the INF Treaty "clearly caused a lack of trust between the two countries, which is a key factor for arms control".

Meanwhile, US political analyst Dan Lazare said that the rise of China and new weapons technology such as hypersonic missiles and long-range nuclear-armed torpedoes have made it more difficult to extend START to deal with the security and technological challenges of the new era.

According to Mr. Lazare, failure to extend New START will trigger a new multilateral nuclear arms race involving not only Russia and the US, but also China, North Korea and Iran./.