By Andrea Shalal and Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would like to have conversations with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping about imposing limits on their nuclear arsenals.
Answering questions from reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said denuclearization would be a goal in his second term.
Russia warned on Monday that the outlook for extending the last remaining pillar of nuclear arms control between Moscow and Washington, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, did not look promising and that the situation appeared to be deadlocked.
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them, is due to run out in less than a year – on February 5, 2026.
Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he supports moves toward denuclearization and there is no reason to build nuclear weapons.
Trump said he had already reached an understanding with Putin on cutting back nuclear weapons during his first term, and China was “very open” to it, but the effort floundered once the COVID pandemic began.
The United States, under Trump’s predecessor, then-President Joe Biden, pushed China to break a longstanding resistance to nuclear arms talks to little avail.
Trump said he would take a fresh look at the issue, starting with conversations with Putin and Xi, and potentially moving to a trilateral meeting.
He gave no specific timeline for these discussions, but said he hoped to get started in the “not too distant future.”
“There’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on military. There’s no reason for you to be spending $400 billion – China is going to be at $400 billion,” he said. “I’m going to say we can settle this, we can spend this on other things.”
Trump said it didn’t matter to him where the meetings took place. “It’s the end result that counts.”
“We already have so many, you could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over,” he said. “China is trying to catch up because they’re very substantially behind, but within five or six years, they’ll be even.”
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Steve Holland; Editing by Chris Reese and Diane Craft)
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