Open Skies, New START Pacts With Russia Face Bleak Outlook

The world's two nuclear superpowers have never unleashed against one another, but two longstanding agreements that have helped keep the United States and Russia from doing so now appear to be on the verge of collapse.On Friday, Russia's Foreign Ministry announced that strategic (read: nuclear) talks with the U.S. scheduled for this month have been "postponed indefinitely," the Russian Interfax news agency. Those talks had been expected to center on a possible 5-year extension of the 2010 New Start nuclear arms control , which is set to expire 16 days after the next U.S. presidential inauguration. "The ball isIt may already be too late to work out an extension of New START. Russia's Foreign Ministry that with the time that remains before the treaty's Feb. 5, 2021, expiration, it will be impossible to complete a new document that could extend the arms pact.Last week two of the Open Skies pact's harshest congressional critics, Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., introduced demanding the U.S. ditch the treaty. At of Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, who's nominated to fill the vacant U.S. ambassador's post in Moscow, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., suggested it was former National Security Advisor John Bolton who prodded Trump to abjure the overflight arrangement with Moscow.