white house —
Arms control advocates are hoping U.S. President Donald Trump’s fresh words of support for denuclearization will lead to talks with Russia and China on arms reduction.
U.S. negotiations with the Russians and Chinese on denuclearization and eventual agreements are “very possible,” according to Trump, who addressed the World Economic Forum a week ago in Davos, Switzerland.
“Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear [weapons], and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about because you don’t want to hear,” he said. “It’s too depressing.”
Trump noted that in his first term, he discussed the topic with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We were talking about denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along,” according to Trump. “President Putin really liked the idea of cutting back on nuclear [armaments], and I think the rest of the world — we would have gotten them to follow.”
Just months before leaving office, former U.S. President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in Peru where both agreed that decisions regarding the use of nuclear weapons should remain under human control. That consensus was seen as a positive step after the Chinese, four months previously, suspended nuclear arms control talks with Washington to protest American arms sales to Taiwan.
The horror of nuclear attacks first became evident to many in the world through magazines in the West, which printed photographs of the radiation-burned survivors of the U.S. atomic attack on two Japanese cities in 1945 to end World War II. In subsequent years during the Cold War, U.S. government films captured the destructive force of test detonations in the Nevada desert, eventually prompting public demonstrations to "ban the bomb" and diplomacy to reduce or eliminate all nuclear weapons.
A major breakthrough occurred in 1987 with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) between the United States and the Soviet Union. It entered into full force the following year. By 1991, nearly 2,700 missiles had been dismantled. That was the first time the two nuclear superpowers achieved a reduction of such weapons rather than just limiting their growth.
Over the years, the Americans and the Russians lost their monopoly on nuclear weapons. Nine countries presently have nuclear arsenals, although Israel has never acknowledged possession of such weaponry.
The United States and Russia each have more than 5,000 nuclear warheads — 90% of the world’s total. The combined global force of all countries’ nuclear weapons could destroy the world many times over, according to arms control advocates.
The current New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), signed in 2010 by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, set limits on the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads and delivery systems, while including on-site inspection and exchanges of data for verification.
The expires in early February 2026, which adds urgency to Trump’s call for talks with Russia and China, according to Xiaodon Liang, senior analyst for nuclear weapons policy and disarmament at the Arms Control Association.
"And because of that, this issue has to be at the top of the agenda, and having a signal that the president is concerned about this issue and thinking about it is very positive,” Liang told VOA.
Since a formal, comprehensive agreement could take years to negotiate — possibly spanning beyond the four years of the second Trump presidency — Liang suggests the U.S. president consider an “executive agreement” with Putin, an informal consensus or a series of unilateral steps to continue adhering to the numbers in New START for an indefinite period.
“That would be a stabilizing factor in this important bilateral relationship,” Liang added.
There are analysts who advocate a more aggressive tactic.
Trump should consider ordering a resumption of nuclear testing to demonstrate to America’s adversaries that the U.S. arsenal of weapons of mass destruction remains viable and as an act of resolve, writes Robert Peters, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank seen as having a dominant influence on Trump administration policies.
that Trump might want to withdraw from the 1963 Test Ban Treaty made with Moscow and “conduct an above-ground test either at the Nevada National Security Site or in the Pacific Ocean over open water, where nuclear fallout can be minimized” to stave escalatory moves by an adversary to the United States.
The Heritage Foundation did not respond to multiple requests from VOA to interview Peters.