N-TREATY – RUSSIA & USA

Russia suspended a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, announcing that new strategic systems had been put on combat duty, and threatening to resume nuclear tests.
Nearly a year after ordering an invasion that has triggered the biggest confrontation with the West in six decades, Russia would achieve its aims and accused the West of trying to destroy it.
“The elites of the West do not hide their purpose. But they also cannot fail to realise that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”
Alleging that the US was turning the war into a global conflict, Russia was suspending participation in the New START treaty, its last major arms control treaty with Washington.
Signed by then-US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, the treaty caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the countries can deploy.
It is due to expire in 2026.

New START treaty

The name START comes from the original “Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty”, known as START-I, which was signed between the US and the erstwhile USSR in 1991, and came into force in 1994.
START-I, which capped the numbers of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that each side could deploy at 6,000 and 1,600 respectively, lapsed in 2009, and was replaced first by the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Treaty of Moscow), and then by the New START treaty.

SOURCE: THE HINDU, THE ECONOMIC TIMES, PIB

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