The treaty, which restricts the United States and Russia to deploying no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads each, is due to expire on Feb. 5.
“We cannot afford to lose New START’s intrusive inspection and notification tools,” the statement noted.
“Extending the treaty’s limitations on stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons until 2026 allows time and space for our two nations to explore new verifiable arms control arrangements that could further reduce risks to Americans,” Kirby said in the statement.
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The extension and further exploring of new arms control arrangements will be carried out by the State Department, according to the statement.
“A far better approach would be a short, 6-month extension conditioned on finalizing the warhead cap to which Putin agreed. That would stop the massive Russian build-up of ‘non-strategic’ warheads and also keep the world focused on China. Instead, we are getting nothing for extending,” former U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Marshall Billingslea, who negotiated nuclear arms control with Russia on behalf of the Trump administration, wrote Thursday on Twitter.
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday urged the United States and Russia to extend the treaty and to later broaden it.
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“We should not end up in a situation with no limitation on nuclear warheads, and New START will expire within days,” Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.
The treaty’s lapse would end all restraints on deployments of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear warheads and the delivery systems that carry them, with the potential to fuel a new arms race, policy experts have indicated.
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The Kremlin stated on Wednesday it remained committed to extending New START and would welcome efforts promised by the Biden administration to reach an agreement.
“Russia and its president are in favor of preserving this agreement,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call. “If our American colleagues will in fact demonstrate a political will to preserve this pact by extending it, this can only be welcomed.”
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However, the New START treaty may not be fit for purpose in the year 2021. The treaty constraints over 90 percent of the U.S. nuclear deterrent, less than half of Russia’s, but none of China’s, Billingslea said in October at an event held by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
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Russia and the United States together possess more than 90 percent of the world’s total nuclear warheads in 2020, according to the Federation of American Scientists, which tallied 6,372 warheads for Russia and 5,800 for the United States. While it counted China as having 320 nuclear warheads. The exact number held by the communist regime isn’t known.
After both Moscow and Washington withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, New START is the only remaining nuclear arms control deal between the two countries.
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