NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has welcomed the Biden administration's plans to extend the New START agreement, saying the extension should be the first step toward expanding global arms control.
"I welcome President Biden's announcement and his intention to seek an extension of the New START Treaty. I have stated repeatedly that we should not end up in a situation where we have no agreement, no limitation whatsoever on the number of nuclear warheads, and therefore an extension of the New START Treaty is important," Stoltenberg told reporters Friday.
"An extension of the New START Treaty is not the end. It should be the beginning of renewed efforts to strengthen international arms control, to look into how we can cover more weapons systems and also include more nations such as China," he added.
Earlier Friday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki announced that Biden would seek to extend New START, which is set to expire in February, for another five years.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow supports the extension in principle, but has yet to study the details of Biden's proposal. Previously, the spokesman indicated, the US side had "put forward certain conditions for the extension", some of which "were absolutely unacceptable for us, so let us see what the Americans offer now before making any comment".
Lloyd Austin, Biden's nominee for secretary of defence, similarly said that extending New START would be in America's national security interests.
Signed in April 2010, New START is now the last major strategic arms limitation treaty in force between the nuclear superpowers, and limits Russian and US nuclear arsenals to 1,550 total deployed nuclear warheads, as well as the number of deployed ballistic missiles, missile subs and heavy bombers equipped with nuclear weapons to 800 apiece.
The Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a separate Russia-US agreement banning the design, production and deployment of land-based nuclear missile systems in the 500-5,500 km range. Before that, in 2002, the Bush administration unilaterally scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which limited the production of missile defence systems. The latter decision prompted Moscow to begin the development of hypersonic weapons systems which could defeat any existing or prospective missile defences and thus guarantee Russia's strategic response capabilities.