EXPERTS ADVISORY

President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in New START, a nuclear nonproliferation treaty between the U.S. and Russia. New START limits both nations to 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and 700 deployed bombers and missiles that can carry these weapons by air.

University of Michigan experts are available to discuss this development.

Sara Pozzi is the director of the $27.5M Consortium for Monitoring, Technology, and Verification, which develops technologies that verify whether nuclear nonproliferation treaties are being followed, and is a professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences and a professor of physics.

“Russia announced that it would suspend its participation in New START, its only remaining nuclear arms control agreement with the U.S.,” she said. “This is concerning news for nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear security worldwide. The United States and Russia have stockpiled the largest numbers of nuclear weapons in the world, and New START and its predecessor START have reduced those stockpiles, verified through mutual inspections.

“We hope that Russia reconsiders its decision to suspend participation in New START. Arms control agreements are an essential step towards nuclear disarmament, a key pillar of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which the U.S. and Russia both ratified.”

Contact: 734-615-4970, [email protected]

Daniil Manaenkov is a U.S. forecasting specialist at the U-M Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics.

“The just-announced pause of Russia’s participation in the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control deal, threatens the resumption of the nuclear arms race, which could cancel part of the ‘peace dividend’ the U.S. economy enjoyed since the early 1990s,” he said.

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