Global security

Ex-US Envoy Says Trump Nuclear Weapons Comments Could Threaten Global Peace

President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to strengthen and expand the US nuclear arsenal could threaten the very foundation of deterrence with both Russia and China, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Internal Security Affairs Chas Freeman told Sputnik.

...However, Freeman warned that if Trump carried out his threat, he would only succeed in destroying the stable balance of power that maintained world peace, not strengthen it, but creating a more dangerous and unpredictable world system.

"That is what attempts to neutralize other parties' deterrents by building capabilities to overwhelm or to neutralize them aim to accomplish. And it is what President-elect Trump now seems to be proposing with all the alarming vagueness that is inherent in foreign policy by tweet," he said.

Global security

Global Conflicts to Watch in 2017


Over the last several years, concern about a particular threat to the United States has been steadily rising in a survey of American foreign-policy experts and government officials by the Council on Foreign Relations. On an annual basis, hundreds of respondents estimate the likelihood and impact on U.S. interests of 30 possible conflicts in the coming year. These conflicts are then divided into three tiers of risk to the United States or its closest allies. The poll is an attempt to help U.S. policymakers prioritize dangers in a dangerous world.

I

Global security

US-Russia rift threatens science ties that keep us safe

Amid increasing tensions between Washington and Moscow over Syria, Ukraine, cyber hacking, and military maneuvers in the Baltics, the Kremlin’s systematic termination of nuclear cooperation with the United States has gone relatively unnoticed. Both countries embraced such cooperation as a shared global responsibility after the end of the Cold War. A return to nuclear confrontation now sets the clock back, putting both countries at enormous risk and endangering global stability.

This fall, Moscow suspended the US-Russian agreement on the disposition of excess weapons plutonium, terminated an agreement on converting research reactors from highly enriched to low-enriched uranium, and ended a 2013 agreement to cooperate on nuclear- and energy-related scientific research and development.