First President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev believes that the Russian-US Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) should be extended.
“It is necessary to extend the New START, and this is real, the more so since [Joe] Biden advocated this during his election campaign,” he said in an interview with TASS.
According to Gorbachev, he spoke about the need for nuclear disarmament during a meeting with Biden in the White House in 2009.
Moscow and Washington signed the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms in 2010. Under its terms, either country must reduce its strategic offensive arms in such a way that at the end of the seventh year following its entry into force and later on their overall amounts should not exceed 700 units of deployed inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and heavy bombers, 1,550 warheads and 800 operational and non-operational missile launchers and strategic bombers. The treaty was concluded for a period of ten years (until February 5, 2021). It can be replaced by a follow-up agreement before the deadline expires, or prolonged for no more than five years (until 2026) by mutual consent.
