Related Directly.

To the news below about Zircon. As RT reports:

The US has declined an invitation to hold a formal meeting to discuss the legal details of extending the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which is due to expire in a year, a senior Russian diplomat has said.Washington has decided to ditch important talks on the bilateral treaty's fate, the Deputy Director of the Foreign Ministry's Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department, Vladimir Leontyev, told a strategic arms-themed event in the Russian parliament on Thursday.

Two things must be considered here: 

1. Trump and his Administration are trying the only trick they know--to bully and apply max pressure (threats) to get whatever they seek (such as China joining, why?) and then, in the last minute, extend START Treaty. It is obvious that this so called "policy", if it is indeed A policy, doesn't work and will not work with Russia, not to speak of China whose nuclear arsenal is much smaller than that of US or Russia's;

2. Trump, actually wants START to expire--the point of view which I hold so far--which will untie America's hands in building up the only real power tool she has left, nuclear weapons. It is because the United States lost a conventional "arms race", albeit I don't like this term and prefer "being late" for the Real Revolution in Military Affairs. 

As was stated many times, the field in which the United States currently may have some extremely narrow lead or barely parity with Russia is in SOME, I underscore, only SOME, enablers in terms of American developed computational abilities, which derive from still impressive semi-conductor (microchip) industry. Sure, but, as I also repeat ad nauseam, no matter how good your enablers are, if they do not command state-of-the-art weaponry, their value drops dramatically. E.g. LRASM may be everything it is stated to be, long-range, stealthy, smart anti-ship cruise missile, but it is still sub-sonic weapon whose parameters allow modern AD systems develop firing solution, in the worst case scenario, within very few seconds (implying LRASM being detected already within radio-horizon). Consider this simple fact, Russia readies Pantsir SM with hyper-sonic (that is M=5+) missiles which will have no problems dealing with high super-sonic or even low hype-sonic targets at ranges of 40 kilometers, not to speak of a slow subsonic targets even in salvo, since hyper-sonic interceptor missiles shorten the "busy" time of a missile-control channel of AD system dramatically, thus allowing to switch to dealing with other incoming threats much faster.  

This is just a simple example, there are plenty of those, not to mention open admission by leading Russian specialists in early-warning and radar technologies, such as NPO Vympel's own Sergei Boev, about ROFAR (or Radio-photonics) systems getting ready soon to be deployed. Go to minute 31:00 in the video (in Russian). So, no matter how productive one's computer is, if it cannot control weapons capable to reliably, with good level probability, say Pk=0.7 and higher, kill the target it doesn't matter how sophisticated your microchip is, let alone how much your enabler costs--in real war with the peer it will be reduced to a passive expensive equipment. No American weapon in existence can intercept any modern Russian missile systems such as already fully deployed strategic Avangard or anti-shipping (or land-attack, depending on the task) M=9+ Kinzhal or just successfully tested 3M22 Zircon. So, let's drop any pretense of politeness here and admit that in a strategic sense the United States currently is in a very unenviable position, to put it mildly. The nation which US "elite", at least its largest part, and we can state this confidently, hates viscerally, Russia that is, not only called US strategic bluff, but doing so revealed a very real "missile gap" which for the United States will be very difficult, if possible at all, to narrow, forget about closing it. 

So, what's left then for the United States under these conditions? Right, bluff again--because it is the only thing which is left for an enormously expensive and highly ineffective American military machine. One of this bluffs is actual expiration of the START and then attempts to nuclearize US "posture" to the utmost, including manufacturing whatever the strategic and mid-range nuclear missiles the United States will be able to afford and hoping that Russians will buckle and submit to the American demands. Right. It is all from the same opera as current NATO exercise Defender 2020, which is built around "Kaliningrad" scenario and Russians already voiced their concern with this NATO "defending". The essence of the concern is not that some 40, 000 NATO troops can "capture" Kaliningrad exclave--they can't, unless they want to sustain catastrophic casualties--but in the fact that desperate bunch of losers in NATO who cannot win a single war in generations and are clamoring for showing NATO's (that is US presence in Europe) "relevance" may accidentally cross the line and force Russia to, indeed, rearrange stones both at NATO's front lines and in a deep rear. That, of course, reeks of a possibility of a nuclear exchange because the United States (other NATO members are military dwarfs) is inherently nuclear-biased nation because it knows, at least some in Pentagon do, that it cannot fight and win conventional conflict against Russia in her geographic vicinity in a classic combined arms warfare scenario. 

Thus, the United States will continue on a path towards complete nuclearization of its foreign policy, because at this stage the Empire has very little in terms of what can actually fight and win a conventional war with real opponent. Such a posture requires all strategic nuclear weapons limitations treaties to be disposed of. Plain and simple, but that goes far into the American history as a nation which didn't realize itself as a continental military power. Without this realization, even considering American glorious and rich naval history and global naval supremacy in the late XIX and good part of the XX century, we should always remember geopolitical strategic truism: the seat of the government is always on land--just ask Russians, they know.