US will win any nuclear weapons race, says Trump

DONALD Trump yesterday declared the united States was ready for a nuclear arms race.

The president-elect said his country would outmatch any other nuclear nation ‘and outlast them all’.

Mr Trump was expanding on earlier remarks in which he said the US should ‘greatly strengthen’ its nuclear arsenal. His stance puts him at odds with decades of progress toward reducing stockpiles of the weapons.

The number of operational warheads around the world has fallen from a high of 64,452 in 1986 to 10,315 last year.

Mr Trump signalled the change of direction when he telephoned the MSNBC TV breakfast show.

According to host Joe Scarborough, in an off-air conversation Mr Trump said: ‘Let it be an arms race, we will outmatch them at every pass. And outlast them all.’

Earlier this week he tweeted: ‘The united States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.’

Mr Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, made contradictory statements as he sought to explain what the president-elect meant. Mr Spicer told NBC there was ‘not going to be’ an arms race and that ‘we will all be just fine’.

However he told CNN that the US would not allow other countries to build more nukes without reply.

‘There are countries around the globe right now that are talking about increasing their nuclear capacity,’ he said. ‘And the united States is not going to sit back and allow that to happen without acting in kind.’

Mr Spicer said he was not just talking about Russia – a country that Mr Trump has said that he wants to work closely with.

At a news conference yesterday Vladimir Putin said Mr Trump won the US election because he ‘understood the mood of the people and kept going until the end, when nobody believed in him’.

The Russian president added: ‘The Democrats are losing on all fronts and looking elsewhere for things to blame. In my view this, how shall I say it, degrades their own dignity. You have to know how to lose with dignity.’

Mr Putin said he would be willing to negotiate deals with individual countries that did not want to stay in the European union, a potential olive branch to Britain after Brexit.

And he insisted it was ‘not us who have been speeding up the arms race’, saying he was not worried by Mr Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons.