Biden hires attorney Mallory Stewart for U.S. arms control position Reuters

Arshad Mohamed

Washington (Reuters)-President Joe Biden said on Friday that he plans to nominate Mallory Stewart as Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control. This is a key task because Washington and Moscow are considering a new START arms control treaty. Successor.

The White House said in a statement that if confirmed by the Senate, Stewart, the current senior director of the White House National Security Council, will lead the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau.

The United States and Russia extended the new START for five years in February. The treaty entered into force for the first time in 2011, restricting the deployment of no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads by the United States and Russia each, and restricting land-based and submarine-based missiles and bombers.

Historically, the assistant secretary of state responsible for arms control has played a central role in the negotiation of such agreements.

At the Geneva summit on June 16, Biden and Russian President Putin agreed to start “strategic stability” talks to “lay the foundation for future arms control and risk reduction measures.”

Stewart worked in the bureau and served as the State Department’s arms control lawyer. He is the designer of the US-Russian framework to eliminate Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpiles.

Syria joined the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2013 to avoid military intervention by the United States in earlier chemical attacks. Syria stated that it has completely destroyed its chemical weapons stockpiles declared to the organization.

However, OPCW investigators found in an April 2020 report that in March 2017, Syrian military aircraft and a helicopter dropped banned sarin and chlorine bombs on the Ltamenah village in Syria.