But Moscow warns against insisting on including China in New Start negotiations
Russia has confirmed that it will open talks with the US this month on extending a major nuclear disarmament treaty but warned that Washington’s insistence on including China could scuttle efforts.
The deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov will meet the US envoy Marshall Billingslea in Vienna on 22 June to begin negotiations on New Start, which expires in February.
Continue reading...The president believes he alone can negotiate away nuclear weapons and win a Nobel prize – but he has quit three treaties and gutted his administration of experts
The Trump administration signaled this week that it was ready to get back in the business of nuclear arms control. A newly appointed envoy, Marshall Billingslea, made his first public remarks to announce talks with Russia are about to resume.
“We have concrete ideas for our next interaction, and we’re finalizing the details as we speak,” Billingslea said.
Continue reading...Leader makes first appearance in several weeks to talk about ‘considerably increasing the firepower’ of the military, state media reports
North Korea discussed new policies for increasing its “nuclear war deterrence” during a military meeting presided over by leader Kim Jong-un, state news agency KCNA reported on Sunday.
KCNA did not specify what the nuclear deterrence entailed, but said that “crucial measures” were taken at the meeting “for considerably increasing the firepower strike ability of the artillery pieces of the Korean People’s Army”.
Continue reading...Discussion held this month as way to press Russia and China into agreeing arms control deal, officials say
US officials have debated whether to carry out the first US nuclear tests in 28 years as a way to pressure Russia and China into make a trilateral arms control deal, according congressional aides and former officials.
They said the discussion took place at a “deputies meeting” of senior national security officials at the White House on 15 May, but that the proposal was shelved for the time being.
Continue reading...The world’s nuclear-armed nations spent a record $73bn on their weapons last year, with the US spending almost as much as the eight other states combined, according to a new report.
The new spending figures, reflecting the highest expenditure on nuclear arms since the height of the cold war, have been estimated by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), which argues that the coronavirus pandemic underlines the wastefulness of the nuclear arms race.
Continue reading...Suspected short-range missile launches come as Pyongyang announces legislature to meet in April amid coronavirus pandemic
North Korea fired two projectiles that appeared to be short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off the east coast of the Korean peninsula, South Korea’s military reported.
The launch on Saturday follows two earlier this month, when North Korea fired short-range missiles and multiple projectiles, according to South Korea’s military, drawing US and Chinese appeals for Pyongyang to return to talks on ending its nuclear and missile programmes.
Continue reading...Not long ago, I travelled to the Black Hills of South Dakota to see the place from which humanity would supposedly be reborn after global civilisational collapse. The end of the world was trending, and it seemed as good a time as any to visit a place for sitting out the last days. Over the previous few months, perhaps as a means of sublimating my own anxieties about raising a small child in an increasingly dark and volatile world, I had become preoccupied with the apocalyptic tone of our culture.
One of the more perverse aspects of this obsession was a months-long binge of doomsday prepper content, of blogs and forums and YouTube videos in which burly American guys, most of whom were called things like Kyle or Brent, explained how to prepare for a major catastrophe – your global pandemics, your breakdowns of law and order, your all-out nuclear wars – by pursuing various strategies for “tactical survival”. And this had opened out on to a broader vista of apocalyptic preparedness, and to a lucrative niche of the real estate sector catering to individuals of means who wanted a place to retreat to when things truly went sideways.
Continue reading...Now that Britain has left the European Union, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has moved swiftly to put French nuclear weapons front and centre of EU defence policies. In an hour-long speech on Friday to L’École de guerre (School of War) in Paris, the French president called for a European dialogue about defence and deterrence based on France’s force de frappe of nuclear weapons launched by air and submarine, and invited other EU states to participate in exercises by his country’s nuclear forces.
This is the post-Brexit revival of a vision held by successive French leaders, who itched to establish EU defence policies that would rely on European nuclear weapons rather than the US and Nato. For decades, this aim was marginalised by other EU members. Brexit, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have emboldened Macron to put it back on the table – and this time he is getting more attention.
Continue reading...First submarine to go on patrol armed with the W76-2 warhead makes a nuclear launch more likely, arm control advocates warn
The US has deployed its first low-yield Trident nuclear warhead on a submarine that is currently patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, it has been reported, in what arms control advocates warn is a dangerous step towards making a nuclear launch more likely.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, the USS Tennessee – which left port in Georgia at the end of last year – is the first submarine to go on patrol armed with the W76-2 warhead, commissioned by Donald Trump two years ago.
Continue reading...The risk of civil collapse from nuclear weapons and the climate crisis is at a record high, according to US scientists and former officials, calling the current environment “profoundly unstable”.
Related: Trump's impeachment lawyers 'tending toward conspiracy theories' says Schiff – live trial updates
Continue reading...If the 2015 nuclear pact cannot be rebuilt or a new one struck, then the choice will be to let Iran have the bomb or to bomb Iran
Next week the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will unveil the current time on its Doomsday Clock, meant to convey the nuclear dangers facing the world. The closer the clock is to midnight, the greater the existential threat. If the stand-off between Iran and Donald Trump persists, or takes a frightening turn for the worse, then the clock’s hands may be closer to the bell tolling than they have ever been. This would mean the danger to the planet was judged greater than at any time since the first H-bomb tests.
The drumbeat of war reverberates around the Middle East. On Tuesday, Britain, France and Germany said that they had been “left with no choice” but to trigger a dispute mechanism in the six-nation nuclear deal with Iran after Tehran declared, in the aftermath of the US assassination of its top general, that it would no longer observe the pact’s “operational restrictions”. Iran’s president then warned that European soldiers in the Middle East “could be in danger”, a clear indication that if the continent stood with Mr Trump then its forces could expect to be treated as enemy combatants.
Continue reading...Trump says he trusts leader to refrain from testing, despite Kim’s criticism of Washington’s ‘gangster-like demands’
Kim Jong-un has signalled that North Korea will lift its moratoriums on nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests in a move likely to anger Donald Trump.
The North Korean leader told a four-day meeting of party officials in Pyongyang that the test ban, which Kim agreed to in talks with the US president, was no longer needed, state media said on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Avangard capable of carrying 2-megaton nuclear weapon at 27 times the speed of sound
Russia has deployed its first hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles, with Vladimir Putin boasting that it puts his country in a class of its own.
The president described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite.
Continue reading...Donald Trump said on Sunday North Korean leader Kim Jong-un risks losing “everything” and his country must denuclearize, after the North said it had carried out a “successful test of great significance”.
“Kim Jong-un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way. He signed a strong Denuclearization Agreement with me in Singapore,” Trump said on Twitter, referring to his first summit with Kim in 2018.
Continue reading...US president says potential Democratic rival is ‘somewhat better than that’ and urges North Korean leader to agree nuclear deal
Donald Trump has come to the defence of one of his potential rivals for the presidency, telling North Korea its recent description of Joe Biden as a “rabid dog” that should be “beaten to death” was a little unfair.
Trump’s criticism of Pyongyang – albeit via a half-hearted endorsement of Biden’s character – came amid attempts to resurrect stalled nuclear talks, with Trump imploring North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to “get the deal done”, and the US and South Korea agreeing to postpone an annual air force drill the North routinely condemns as a rehearsal for an invasion.
Continue reading...Decommissioned nuclear silo accessed 40ft staircase leading underground was once home to US’s largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever deployed
One local newspaper described the sales listing, with calculated understatement, as a “mid-century fixer-upper”: an underground bunker built to withstand a nuclear attack, and to house the fire power to retaliate.
The decommissioned nuclear silo in southern Arizona was once home to the Titan II, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile deployed by the US Air Force.
Continue reading...US secretary of state accuses Tehran of trying to ‘intimidate’ woman while Iran says tests indicated she possessed ‘suspect’ material
The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has criticised Iran’s treatment of an inspector with the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency as “an outrageous and unwarranted act of intimidation”.
The top US diplomat said that Iran had “detained” the inspector, who the International Atomic Energy Agency said had been briefly prevented from leaving the country.
Continue reading...Kim Jong-un ‘expressed satisfaction’ with the test and congratulated weapons scientists, state media said
North Korea conducted another test of super-large multiple rocket launchers on Thursday afternoon, calling it a success, the state news agency KCNA said on Friday.
The latest test of the “super-large multiple rocket launchers”, following two tests in August and September of the same weapon that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un oversaw, according to KCNA, indicates the progression of North Korea’s weapons development while talks with the US remain in limbo.
Continue reading...State media says test-firing ushers in ‘new phase’ in country’s defence systems, ahead of nuclear talks with US
North Korea says it successfully test-fired a new type of submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) from the sea off its east coast.
“The new-type ballistic missile was fired in vertical mode” in the waters off Wonsan Bay on Wednesday, the North’s KCNA state news agency reported.
Continue reading...Iranian president tells cabinet the country had been ready to accept terms of French UN plan
The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, has told his cabinet that while the country had been ready to end its nuclear stand-off with the US broadly on terms set out by France at the United Nations, Donald Trump was not prepared to make public an apparent private offer to lift sanctions.
Although his account is inherently not impartial, it is the fullest version of behind-the-scenes diplomacy at the UN general assembly provided by the Iranians.
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