WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — United States nuclear arms control efforts should focus beyond Russia toward US friends and allies, former Pentagon official and executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center Henry Sokolski told Sputnik.
“There are other problems that are more tractable,” Sokolski said Friday of the heavy US emphasis on Russian arms control.
During a Friday speech at the Hudson Institute, Sokolski explained that US arms control “tends to focus… an awful lot on Russia,” and not enough on nuclear weapons states that are up and coming.
Sokolski criticized the mainstream idea “that proliferation is what we worry about if our enemies get certain things, and it’s what we help our friends do.”
The United States and Russia together hold nearly 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
Sokolski raised concerns about nations on the brink of a nuclear weapons capability, such as Japan and South Korea. “We [the United States] have to worry about our allies, too,” he said.
Russia and the United States have signed more than half a dozen major bilateral arms control treaties since the start of the Cold War, none of which have been joined by other world nuclear powers.
Sokolski worked in the Pentagon as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy and was appointed by the US Congress to head two commissions on nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction.
