AP FACT CHECK: Trump gets facts wrong on START Treaty

WASHINGTON – A claim from the final presidential debate and how it stacks up with the facts:

DONALD TRUMP: Referring to a 2010 U.S.-Russia treaty limiting both countries to 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, Trump said, “They create warheads. We can’t.”

The FACTS: Incorrect. The New START treaty, which Trump called “Start Up,” does not prevent either the U.S. or Russia from building nuclear warheads. It restricts each country to a total of 1,550 warheads deployed on bombers, submarines and in underground silos and requires that this limit be reached by February 2018.

Trump also said that after the treaty was signed, “They expanded and we didn’t.”

It’s true that the Russians have increased the number of their deployed warheads to 1,796, and the U.S. warhead total has dropped to 1,367. But it also is true that their total was far below that of the U.S. when the treaty went into effect in 2010. New data published by the State Department this month showed that although Russia has added to its warhead total, its inventory of missile launchers, such as underground silos, has shrunk.

Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, who closely tracks U.S. and Russian strategic forces, says the rise in Russian deployed warheads is temporary and is to be followed by the retirement of older nuclear weapons so that Moscow gets under the treaty limits. “Russian compliance with the treaty by 2018 is not in doubt,” he wrote recently.

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Contributed by Associated Press National Security Writer Robert Burns.

EDITOR’S NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figures