David Sanger

And there's every bit of evidence that they do have the missiles that can reach the United States or will soon be able to reach the United States.

Well, this gets to the central question of whether or not Iran is our most serious ally.

nuclear problem right now.

And I think you could argue that the fastest growing program is China's.

And the one that you might want to worry about the most is Russia's.

So let me just take those apart.

When Xi Jinping took over in China,

The country had gone through decades of theory of minimum nuclear deterrent.

It was created by Mao Zedong.

The country had roughly 200 nuclear weapons.

It wasn't an arsenal even big enough for the U.S.

to wrap into arms control talks.

Once Xi came in, he looked around the world and said, if we're going to become a great power, we need to have the nuclear arsenal of a great power.

By current Pentagon assessments, they've got slightly more than 600 nuclear weapons now, so they've tripled.

They're on the way to 1,000 by 2030, maybe 1,500 deployed weapons, which is about what the U.S.

and Russia deploy currently, by 2035.

And there are no nuclear arms control talks underway with China.

And the Chinese say, we're not even going to start such discussions until we've got an arsenal comparable to yours.

So that's problem one.

Problem number two is that the last arms control agreement, as you suggested, with Russia expired on February 5th.