US President Donald Trump on Thursday said that he wanted to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China, and that eventually he hoped all three countries could agree to cut their massive defense budgets in half.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office in Washington, Trump lamented the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in rebuilding the nation’s nuclear deterrent and said he hoped to gain commitments from the US’ adversaries to cut their own spending.
“There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over, and here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive,” Trump said.
While the US and Russia hold massive stockpiles of weapons since the Cold War, Trump predicted that China would catch up in its capability to exact nuclear devastation “within five or six years.”
He said if the weapons were ever called to use, “that’s going to be probably oblivion.”
Trump said he would look to engage in nuclear talks with the two countries once “we straighten it all out” in the Middle East and Ukraine.
“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi [Jinping, 習近平) of China, President [Vladimir] Putin of Russia,” Trump said. “And I want to say: ‘Let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to do it.”
Trump in his first term tried and failed to bring China into nuclear arms reduction talks when the US and Russia were negotiating an extension of a pact known as New START.
Russia suspended its participation in the treaty during the administration of former US president Joe Biden, as Washington and Moscow continued on massive programs to extend the lifespans or replace their Cold War-era nuclear arsenals.
China has rebuffed past US efforts to draw it into nuclear arms talks, saying the US and Russia first need to reduce their much larger arsenals.
A government official reiterated that position yesterday.
“The US and Russia should ... significantly and substantially reduce their nuclear arsenals and create the necessary conditions for other nuclear-armed states to join the nuclear disarmament process,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun (郭嘉昆) said at a daily briefing in Beijing.
It is also far from certain that China or Russia would agree to such cuts given how US defense spending of about US$850 billion dwarfs their annual outlays. China was forecast to spend about US$230 billion on defense last year and is in the middle of a major military expansion. Russia’s defense budget last year has grown significantly since the start of war in Ukraine, but was still about half that.
Guo said “the limited national defense spending of China is what is needed to defend its national sovereignty, security and development interests, and what is needed to safeguard world peace.”
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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