US President Donald Trump emphasized that all countries should disarm their nuclear weapons, rather than engaging in a nuclear arms race.
According to the Anadolu agency, Trump made the comments on Thursday during a press conference in the Oval Office. “It would be great if all of them would disarm” Trump said, adding, “Russia and we have far more, China will have the same in four or five years and it would be great if we could all denuclearize, because the power of nuclear weapons is crazy. It’s crazy.”
Trump also expressed a desire to start discussions on the issue, stating, “Denuclearization would be incredible.”
In the previous month, Trump argued that a nuclear arms race is wasteful and that the US has “no reason” to build new weapons. “We’re giving a lot of money out and we could give it to other things that are hopefully much more productive” he said.
The comments come amid tensions between Russia and NATO, as well as Trump’s trade war with China.
Earlier this week, French President Emmanuel Macron labeled Russia a “threat to France and Europe” and suggested that France could expand its nuclear deterrent to protect other EU member states. The Kremlin has condemned Macron’s words as “highly confrontational.”
During Trump’s first term, the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a 1987 agreement signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Russia has condemned the US withdrawal and rejected Washington’s allegations that it had secretly violated the treaty.
In 2023, Russia announced the deployment of its nuclear weapons in Belarus, citing tensions with NATO. A year later, President Vladimir Putin overhauled the official Russian nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. Moscow also warned that it could resume nuclear testing if the US did so first.
In January, the US announced the deployment of modernized nuclear bombs on its European bases. Media reports suggest that the Pentagon is also planning to station nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom.
Russia has consistently urged the nuclear powers to act responsibly. “We have never started discussions about what to do with nuclear weapons or whether they can be used” said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in December. “In a nuclear war, there can be no winners and therefore, it should never happen.