Trump's Head START on New Nuclear Approach

Trump’s Head START on New Nuclear Approach

Posted: June 4th, 2019

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010. He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.

OPINION — President Trump plans to wait until next year to decide what he will do about the 2010 new START strategic nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, which runs out in February 2021, senior administration officials told a Hudson Institute meeting last Wednesday.

The session drew headlines last week after Defense Intelligence Agency Director, Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley Jr. used it to suggest Russia may be capable of — or actually doing — low-yield nuclear testing in possible violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But it was a later discussion of the President’s rather ambitious arms control ideas that caught my interest.

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