MOSCOW (Reuters) -The Kremlin indicated on Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield plans could force the resumption in the foreseeable future of contacts between Moscow and Washington about nuclear arms control.
Asked about Trump’s announcement that he had selected a design for the $175-billion Golden Dome missile defense shield, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was a sovereign matter for the United States.
The so-called “Golden Dome”, inspired by Israel’s land-based Iron Dome defense shield, is an ambitious project aimed at blocking threats from China and Russia, which the United States views as its two biggest geopolitical competitors.
Peskov, asked if Russia saw the project as a threat to Russia’s nuclear parity with the United States, said that there was no detail about the U.S. project and many nuances remained.
“In the foreseeable future, the very course of events requires the resumption of contacts on issues of strategic stability,” Peskov said.
Russia and the United States, by far the biggest nuclear powers, have both expressed regret about the disintegration of the tangle of arms control treaties which sought to slow the arms race and reduce the risk of nuclear war.
The United States blames Russia for the collapse of agreements such as the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
The United States formally withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, citing Russian violations which Moscow denied. The United State withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002.
“Now that the legal framework in this area has been destroyed, and the validity period has expired, or deliberately, let’s say, a number of documents have ceased to be valid, this base must be recreated both in the interests of our two countries and in the interests of security throughout the planet,” Peskov said.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
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