‘Whole thing is a shame’: Trump says he is talking to China, Russia about denuclearisation

US President Donald Trump said he is talking to China and Russia about denuclearising the countries with the biggest stockpiles of nuclear weapons. He said the whole thing is a shame. Trump had previously and often spoken about denuclearisation, stating that the money used in developing nuclear heads could be used for other purposes.

During an interview with Newsmax, Trump said he expects China to ‘catch up’ with the US in the next five years. "The whole thing is a shame, ​because I'd love to denuclearize if possible, ​but we're actually talking to Russia about that, and ‌we're ⁠talking to China about that denuclearization," he said, adding that he already had a conversation with Xi Jinping about it.

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Russia has the most number of nuclear warheads followed by the US and then China, as per the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Trump made these comments months after the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expired earlier this year.The New START treaty, signed in 2010, allowed for a single extension. This extension was agreed upon by then President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin for five years. Any further extension of the treaty would require an executive decision to voluntarily extend its limits.

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Earlier this year Trump had sounded hopeful all the three countries would cut their massive defence budgets in half. He said hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in rebuilding the nation’s nuclear deterrent. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many…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,” he had told reporters at the Oval Office.

He said everyone’s spending a lot of money that could be spent on other things that are actually much more productive, also adding that if the weapons were actually ever used it’s “going to be probably oblivion”.

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