U.S. President-elect Donald Trump says he wants to “greatly strengthen and expand” the nuclear capabilities of the United States.
Trump said in a tweet Thursday the United States must take such action “until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes”.
Trump’s statement comes just a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin made similar comments Thursday, saying his country’s own nuclear arsenal needs to be “considerably increased.”
During a speech to recount the various military campaigns Russia launched in 2016, Putin said improvements are needed to “neutralize any military threat.”
“We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems,” he said.
The United States and Russia both currently hold comparable stockpiles of nuclear weapons, with 7,100 and 7,300 respectively, according to the nonpartisan U.S.-based Arms Control Association.
Trump’s call for an expansion of nuclear arms also comes a day after he met with several top military officers at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It is not clear, though, whether nuclear weapons were discussed at the meeting.
During his presidential campaign, Trump made comments that suggest he believes more nuclear weapons would make the world a safer place.
“Wouldn’t you rather, in a certain sense, have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons,” he said during a CNN town hall.
But later, in an interview with the New York Times, he said he thinks “it’s a very scary nuclear world.”
“Biggest problem, to me, in the world, is nuclear, and proliferation,” he said.
Should Trump ultimately choose to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal, it would come as a major change to recent U.S. foreign policy, which has been to reduce the number of nuclear weapons during the past several decades.
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