United States President Donald Trump said Thursday that he wants to resume talks with Russia and China on nuclear arms control, the AP news agency reports.
The US president hopes the three countries can agree to cut their massive defense budgets in half.
"There's no reason for us to be building new nuclear weapons. We already have plenty," Trump said from the Oval Office. "We're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are more productive."
While the US and Russia have maintained massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons since the Cold War, Trump has predicted that China will reach full capacity to inflict nuclear destruction within five or six years.
In his first term as president, Trump had tried to convince China to discuss reducing nuclear weapons, while the United States and Russia were negotiating an extension of the START treaty.
