Ambassador: Time is right for new arms control agreement

The ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Trump administration has sketched out a framework that it hopes will avoid a three-way arms race as a deadline nears for extending the only remaining nuclear arms control deal with Russia and as China looks to expand its nuclear forces.

Ambassador-Marshall Billingslea, the special presidential envoy for arms control, spoke with The Associated Press about negotiations with Russia while touring some of the top nuclear research labs and production sites in the United States.

Last week’s visit to New Mexico, Texas and Tennessee comes as facilities ramp up modernization of the country’s multibillion-dollar nuclear enterprise, which includes capabilities for producing plutonium cores used in warheads and technology for aiding nonproliferation of weapons around the globe.

Billingslea said the proposed agreement would be ambitious and that the time is right to “go down this path.”

“As President Trump has made clear, he intends to and has shown away ahead with the Russian federation — and ultimately with China — thatwe can do something that no one has ever done before,” he said.

Signed in 2010, the New START treaty limits U.S. and Russia to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. It represents the only remaining nuclear arms control deal between the two countries after they both withdrew from 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty last year.

Billingslea said the existing New START treaty has loopholes and any new agreement with Russia should include nuclear and conventional warheads and bolster verification protocols and transparency. With such an agreement in place, he said China ultimately would not have much of a choice andwould need to join such a framework.