In his first call as president with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump denounced a treaty that caps US and Russian deployment of nuclear warheads as a bad deal for the US, according to two US officials and one former US official.
When Putin raised the possibility of extending the 2010 treaty, known as New START, Trump paused to ask his aides in an aside what the treaty was, these sources said.
Trump then told Putin the treaty was one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration.
Trump also talked about his own popularity, the sources said.
"I would say they had a very productive call," White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters.
"It wasn't like he didn't know what was being said. He wanted an opinion on something," Spicer said.
New START gives both countries until February 2018 to reduce their deployed strategic nuclear warheads to no more than 1,550, the lowest level in decades.
During a debate in the 2016 presidential election, Trump said Russia had "outsmarted" the United States with the treaty, which he called "START-Up.
He asserted incorrectly then that it had allowed Russia to continue to produce nuclear warheads while the US could not.
Two Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, senators Jeanne Shaheen and Edward J. Markey, criticised Trump for deriding what they called a key nuclear arms control accord.
"New START has unquestionably made our country safer, an opinion widely shared by national security experts on both sides of the aisle," Shaheen said.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he supported the treaty during his Senate confirmation hearings.
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