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© EPA/VALDA KALNINA
USA today is hardly be in a situation where they will have first to use nuclear weapons. This opinion, speaking in Washington the Carnegie endowment to promote world peace, expressed by Vice-President Joseph Biden.
“Given all of our non-nuclear and the nature of today’s threats, it is difficult to imagine a plausible scenario in which the use by the United States nuclear weapons would be the first necessary step and will have sense,” he said. The Vice President noted that at the moment the United States are participants in 22 international agreements on non-military uses of nuclear materials.
Biden also referred to the Contract on reduction of strategic offensive arms (start I), which was signed by the presidents of Russia and USA on 8 April 2010 in Prague. According to him, this was “the most ambitious agreement in the field of arms control”. “It’s not a matter of trust or good will. It is a question of strategic stability and greater openness between the two largest nuclear superpowers”, the politician said, noting that the value of this contract has increased against the background of deteriorating Russian-American relations.
The Vice President claimed that since 2009, “the United States disposed of 2226 nuclear warheads”, arms now stand 4018 charges, another 2,800 will soon be destroyed. Biden also chided Russia that she allegedly “refused to negotiate further reductions in deployed and non-deployed arsenals”. At the same time, he said, “next year the volume of strategic nuclear weapons in our countries will be reduced to the lowest over the past six decades.”
The Treaty on strategic arms reduction provides a reduction of deployed strategic delivery vehicles on each side to 700 and up to 1,550 nuclear warheads on them. The validity period is 10 years.
In September 2016, the Deputy Director of the Department for nonproliferation and arms control, the Russian foreign Ministry Vladimir Leontyev said that Moscow urges not to hurry with the extension of this document. “We haven’t even reached those levels means that the contract is fixed. This should occur in February 2018, the diplomat stated. – The contract these levels is not limited, it’s only seven lines in one of its articles”.