Amid a wave of early shakeups in the new administration, President Donald Trump has twice this month proposed “denuclearization” talks with U.S. adversaries.
“Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capacity is something we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it,” Trump mused in remarks to the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, last week.
“I want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think it’s very possible,” suggesting talks on the issue between the U.S., Russia and China.
Such an idea could represent a major thawing in U.S. relations with two global adversaries – but beg the question of whether the U.S. could trust the nations to hold up their end of the deal.
President Vladimir Putin announced Russia would suspend its participation in the New START treaty in 2023 over U.S. support for Ukraine. Russia had frequently been caught violating the terms of the deal. But China has never engaged in negotiations with the U.S. over arms reduction.
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“I would have made a deal with Putin on that denuclearization,” Trump told Hannity. (Fox News / Hannity)
Trump reiterated to Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday that he’d been close to a “denuclearization” deal with Russia during his first term.
“I was dealing with Putin about the denuclearization of Russia and the United States. And then we were going to bring China along on that one. I was very close to having a deal. I would have made a deal with Putin on that denuclearization. It’s very dangerous and very expensive, and that would have been great, but we had a bad election that interrupted us.”
The Defense Department now expects that China will have more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, a near-doubling of the estimated 600 they possess right now.
In a speech on Jan. 17, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that “amid a ‘hybrid war’ waged by Washington…
