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Trump Says U.S. Would ‘Outmatch’ Rivals in a New Nuclear Arms Race

President-elect Donald J. Trump, with Michael T. Flynn, his national security adviser, spoke to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Wednesday.Credit...Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday intensified his threat to “expand” America’s nuclear arsenal, saying he was willing to restart a nuclear arms race even as he released a letter from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that pointed toward the possibility of a “pragmatic” set of understandings between Washington and Moscow.

Echoing the conciliatory approach toward Mr. Putin that he exhibited throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump praised the Russian leader for sending a private holiday greeting that called for the two men to act in a “constructive and pragmatic manner.” In a statement as he made Mr. Putin’s letter public, Mr. Trump said the Russian leader’s “thoughts are so correct.”

But earlier in the day, the president-elect also made clear that he meant what he said in a Twitter post on Thursday when he bluntly threatened to expand America’s nuclear arsenal after more than three decades in which the number of American and Russian weapons has shrunk.

Sweeping aside efforts by his aides to temper his comments, or to suggest that he was merely talking about curbing the spread of nuclear technology, especially to terrorists, Mr. Trump told a talk-show host, Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

Through a combination of militaristic bravado and diplomatic outreach four weeks before moving into the Oval Office, Mr. Trump appeared eager to employ his self-described skills as a successful business negotiator, threatening new nuclear deployments as potential leverage against Mr. Putin and other nuclear powers.

Mr. Trump could choose to continue, or even expand, President Obama’s vigorous nuclear modernization plan, already underway, and decide over the next few years whether it is worth spending close to one trillion dollars to replace America’s aging fleets of bombers, submarines and long-range ballistic missiles. Russia and China are in the midst of their own major nuclear modernization efforts.

While previous presidents have spent as long as a year conducting nuclear posture reviews, Mr. Trump once again demonstrated that he has little patience with such traditional niceties and is not holding back his conduct of foreign policy before taking office next month.

“I think it’s putting every nation on notice that the United States is going to reassert its position in the globe,” Sean Spicer, who will be Mr. Trump’s spokesman in the White House, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program on Friday.

Mr. Trump appears to be open to a new relationship with Russia even as he makes threats about what could happen if Mr. Putin crossed him.

In response to Mr. Putin’s letter, Mr. Trump said that a failure by either side to “live up to these thoughts” would require the United States to “travel an alternate path.” That apparently includes Mr. Trump’s belief that his administration would win the upper hand in a renewed, expensive competition over the size and effectiveness of the countries’ nuclear arsenals.

It is unclear what prompted Mr. Trump’s focus on nuclear issues two days before Christmas; senior aides refused repeated requests for an explanation about the roots of his statements. It is also hard to know how much of Mr. Trump’s claim that he could outspend and outpace any adversary amounts to strategy, and how much is simply a negotiating stand.

Activists who have been fighting for years to reduce nuclear stockpiles reacted with alarm at the prospect that the president-elect might engage in a new nuclear competition with Russia.

“The statements made by President-elect Trump undermine decades of work the United States and its allies have been involved in to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles and to prevent the additional proliferation of nuclear weapons,” said Byron L. Dorgan, a former senator from North Dakota and a board member at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “A nuclear arms race puts everyone on this planet in greater danger.”

Mr. Trump’s warning on nuclear weapons came after Mr. Putin vowed to continue modernizing his nation’s nuclear weapons and asserted Russia’s military superiority over the United States.

“Of course the U.S. has more missiles, submarines and aircraft carriers, but what we say is that we are stronger than any aggressor, and this is the case,” Mr. Putin said at an end-of-year news conference in Moscow on Friday.

Mr. Putin said Russia was not seeking a new nuclear arms race with the United States that his country could ill afford, and he reacted dismissively to Mr. Trump’s Twitter post about strengthening and expanding the American arsenal, noting that it was similar to what the president-elect had promised on the campaign trail.

“So there is nothing unusual here,” Mr. Putin said.

As far back as 1987, Mr. Trump talked about his desire to negotiate nuclear arms control agreements with a declining but aggressive Soviet Union.

In recent weeks, he has met with some of the most savvy survivors of the Cold War — notably Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary — at a moment when American relations with Russia are clearly at a turning point.

Republicans who have spoken to Mr. Trump say he seems to realize that his opening gestures to Moscow will be closely observed at home, in Europe and among other allies. Republicans have split with him on Russia’s meddling in the American election, promising congressional inquiries after intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had used a combination of hacking and information warfare techniques to help elect Mr. Trump as president.

At the heart of the question about Mr. Trump’s nuclear plans is what he meant by the phrase “greatly strengthen and expand America’s nuclear capability.” Had he used the word “modernize,” he would have been echoing the phrase used by the Obama administration. But the idea, Mr. Obama has said, is to shrink the arsenal, not increase it.

The modernization effort began in earnest after the passage of the New Start treaty in 2010, an arms control treaty that Mr. Obama pushed through with Dmitri A. Medvedev, then the Russian president. But in the name of improving safety and reliability, some experts — and prominent arms strategists — argued that Mr. Obama was setting the stage for a new president to expand the arsenal.

Mr. Obama acknowledged that danger in the spring, warning of the potential for “ramping up new and more deadly and more effective systems that end up leading to a whole new escalation of the arms race.” It was a startling admission for a president who had come to office more than seven years earlier talking about eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

China, for its part, has been modernizing a fleet of several hundred nuclear missiles and embarked on an aggressive space-weapons program to blind United States satellites in a conflict.

But Mr. Obama’s Pentagon is also leaving a number of projects that Mr. Trump could embrace, including an ultra-high-speed warhead that can travel up to 17,000 miles per hour. The Chinese are working on a similar weapon that is designed to avoid American missile defenses, prompting a warning to a congressional commission last year that an arms race was in its opening moments, long before Mr. Trump was elected.

Michael D. Shear reported from West Palm Beach, Fla., and David E. Sanger from Washington. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from Moscow.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Kindling Talk of an Arms Race With a Vow to ‘Outlast Them All’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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