Opinion | Is Trump killing nuclear arms control or can he broker deals with North Korea and Russia to make the world a safer place?

Arms control isn’t dead, but it is dying and the process has been slow and painful. The death spiral began long before Donald Trump became president of the United States. The last major arms control treaty, New START, which limited Russia and the US to 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons each, was signed in 2010.

Since then, the arms control agenda has ground to a halt. In 2013, then president Barack Obama sought additional reductions, one-third beyond the limits of New START. But the Russians refused, and there was no deal. One year later, the US accused Russia of violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, an agreement that stabilised the nuclear stand-off between East and West as the cold war raged.

One of Trump’s first orders of business upon assuming the presidency was to conduct a nuclear posture review, which for the first time since the Nixon administration expands the role and number of nuclear weapons in America’s national security strategy.

The review calls for the reintroduction of the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, a relic of the cold war that was removed from service in 1991. The document also emphasises the need for new, low-yield nuclear weapons to deter adversaries such as China and Russia. But low-yield nuclear weapons have the opposite effect, serving as a gateway drug for nuclear war by increasing the risk of their use in the first place.

In direct violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Trump has suggested that US allies including South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia develop their own nuclear weapons, rather than rely on the US nuclear umbrella for deterrence. When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told 60 Minutes that his country would “without a doubt” develop nuclear weapons if its arch-rival Iran did, the White House’s failed to condemn his statement, contradicting decades of US policy to discourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology.