Little hope of a deal as US, Russia meet

The United States and Russia yesterday met in Vienna for talks on their last major nuclear weapons agreement against a backdrop of growing tensions and differences over whether they see any value in arms control at all.

US President Donald Trump insists that China should be involved in the talks on New START, the treaty that caps US and Russian nuclear warheads to a maximum of to 1,550. China has shown no sign of being interested.

US ambassador Marshall Billingslea and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov are nonetheless to discuss the future of the New START treaty, which was agreed in 2010 and expires in February 2021.

That leaves very little time to renew a complex deal, let alone negotiate a new treaty involving China, especially with a November presidential election looming.

The deadlock over New START and the demise of other nuclear arms control treaties "suggest that the era of bilateral nuclear arms control agreements between Russia and the USA might be coming to an end," said Shannon Kile of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

According to the institute's latest research, Russia has 6,375 nuclear warheads, including those that are not deployed, and the United States has 5,800. China comes a distant third with 320 warheads.

Meanwhile, China yesterday said it will join a global pact to regulate arms sales that has been rejected by the United States. The Communist Party leadership's top legislative body voted Saturday to adopt a decision on joining the UN Arms Trade Treaty that is designed to control the flow of weapons into conflict zones.