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Poor US leadership will lead to major war with Russia, China: Analyst

Thursday, 25 January 2018 7:19 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 26 January 2018 7:24 AM ]

James Jatras

America’s flawed political leadership and planned expansion of nuclear weapons will lead to a major conflict with Russia and China, says a former US foreign policy adviser and diplomat.

“There is definitely a move towards a new arms race with Russia, the kind of thing that should have ended completely when the first Cold War with the Soviet Union ended,” James Jatras said in an interview with Press TV on Thursday.

“This is a consequence less of military technology than it is of very bad political leadership,” he added. “This eventually can lead in one thing and that’s a major war.”

PressTV-'Trump nuke policy to ignite arms race with Russia'

The Trump administration is planning to adopt a new nuclear weapons policy that experts say would lead to an arms race with Russia.

As the administration of US President Donald Trump prepares to unveil its review of the US nuclear posture, more experts are warning that developing a new type of nuclear weapons to meet President Donald Trump’s demands would trigger an arms race.

A leaked version of the review, which the Pentagon is set to release next week, shows that military officials in Washington are calling for the development of a low-yield nuclear bomb that is designed to be used on the battlefield instead of urban areas.

The Trump administration could explicitly leave open the possibility of nuclear retaliation for major non-nuclear attacks, according to a leaked draft policy document published by the Huffington Post website.

The new nuclear policy is significantly more hawkish than the posture adopted by the administration of former President Barack Obama, which sought to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the US military.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that modernizing and maintaining the nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years will cost more than $1.2 trillion. Maintenance of the existing stockpile would account for nearly half the projected costs.

Daryl Kimball, the head of the Arms Control Association advocacy group in Washington, said that the development of new weapons in the US nuclear arsenal was “dangerous, Cold War thinking.”

“The United States already possesses a diverse array of nuclear capabilities, and there is no evidence that more usable weapons will strengthen deterrence of adversaries or compel them to make different choices about their arsenals,” Kimball wrote on the group’s website.

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