Slate Magazine
•73% Informative
David Rothkopf: World is less disposed to nuclear arms control than at any time in the last half-century.
He says pressures for a renewed nuclear arms race involving more than just two players are disturbingly intense.
Russia has dropped out of the forum that monitors compliance with the New START arms-reduction treaty, he says. China seems on a course to achieve parity with the two larger powers, tripling the number of its nuclear warheads over the next decade.
David Rothkopf: U.S. and Russia are building new weapons, but no one in power is contesting this.
He says the nuclear arms race has come down to theatrics: Russia and China are building more weapons, so we have to do so, too, at a cost of roughly $50 billion a year.
He asks: Why is Russia playing this game? Mainly because Putin is getting desperate, he says, and is trying to shock Western leaders into ending the war, before it reels out of control.
Rothpf: Biden has shown in the past that he understands the insanity of a nuclear race.
China built its first atom bombs in the mid-1960s and has never deployed more than a few hundred of them.
China has dug a lot of ICBM silos and may well soon fill them with ICBMs.
At the current rate, its arsenal of 400 nuclear warheads will rise to 1,500 by 2035.
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