The last nuclear arms control pact between the United States and Russia is set to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The Trump administration has said barely anything about New START’s expiration next Thursday, a day that will mark the end of a half-century of collaboration between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Nor have prominent lawmakers in Congress said much this year about its end, despite the looming potential for an unconstrained three-way arms race, with China’s participation.
Perhaps the highest profile attempt to raise awareness of the end of this era — which has underwritten the national security environment of most of our collective lives — came on Jan. 14. In the early evening, a handful of Democrats took turns on the House floor giving speeches for roughly an hour about the new world we’re about to step into, a performance that even the most ardent C-SPAN viewer might have missed.
The only thing more alarming than the lack of interest among our elected officials in this matter is the mounting pressure on the Trump administration — from both inside and outside the government — to add more nuclear weapons to the stockpile, rather than reduce it.
Once the treaty ends, we will have returned to an era without limits, when arsenals can reach unconstrained heights. The bleak outlook prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday to move its metaphorical Doomsday Clock another notch toward “midnight,” or worldwide catastrophe. It now sits closer than it ever has: 85 seconds to midnight.
It wasn’t long ago that the world’s superpowers agreed that having fewer nukes was a good thing. For decades, the world’s nuclear stockpile was shrinking. There were around 70,400 warheads in 1986, compared with 12,500 today — a reduction that came from years of continual negotiations between Washington and Moscow. What began in 1969 with the launch of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks led to a string of agreements culminating in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which went into force in 2011 and was extended in 2021 for an additional five years.
New START limited each side’s arsenals to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads — long-range weapons loaded onto submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles and bomber planes — and required regular data exchanges and notifications of the number and status of each side’s treaty-accountable weapons. It also allowed for short-notice on-site inspection visits to ensure compliance.
The end of New START is just the latest Cold War treaty to be abandoned or canceled amid worsening U.S.-Russia relations. When President Trump returned to the White House, many hoped he might finally rekindle nuclear arms-control negotiations after years of stalled diplomacy. The president has repeatedly said he was prepared to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world and even said in August that he would like to “denuclearize” altogether if President Vladimir Putin of Russia was willing to reciprocate.
Despite all his nonproliferation posturing, however, Mr. Trump’s actions tell another story. He slashed the number of diplomats working on the nuclear portfolio at the State Department. He openly discussed resuming nuclear testing in October, which would be a significant shift from the U.S. government’s decades-long moratorium. And when The New York Times asked Mr. Trump this month about New START’s pending expiration, he responded: “If it expires, it expires. We’ll do a better agreement.”
That’s wishful thinking. There’s been almost no sign of life in Washington or Moscow over arms control since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In fact, the Trump administration could go in the opposite direction: In recent years, the U.S. military has examined what it would take to add additional thermonuclear warheads to the long-range missiles already in the American arsenal. Currently, each of those missiles has one warhead, but they could have two or more, each aiming at different targets, under what’s called Multiple Independently targetable Re-entry Vehicle, or MIRV, technology.
The United States removed the last MIRV from its missiles in 2014 in part to comply with New START.Without the treaty, the multiple-warhead missiles could be primed for a comeback. With Mr. Trump’s approval, the Pentagon could pull nuclear warheads currently in storage and install them onto the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on alert and underground in five Great Plains states.
It wasn’t long ago that such a strategy, known as “uploading,” would be laughed out of the room as a vestige of the past. But as Russia has continued to update its nuclear forces and China has pursued a huge nuclear buildup, the argument for America to add more nukes has gathered political momentum. While China still has far fewer warheads (an estimated 600) than the United States or Russia (estimated at 3,700 and 4,300, respectively), it is adding them at rates not seen since the Cold War, with no publicly known plans to stop. Beijing has also never signed on to any agreement that limits the size of its arsenal.
U.S. government hawks believe that fielding as many nuclear weapons as Russia and China combined would hold both in check. The easiest way to accomplish this is by uploading more weapons, but this would take time and money.
Rose Gottemoeller, the chief U.S. negotiator for New START, said Russia will be able to adapt to a post-treaty world far faster than the United States. Moscow never stopped fielding MIRVed missiles. “They can sprint away from us in an upload campaign while we’re still struggling to get the technical wherewithal in place to begin uploading existing missiles,” Ms. Gottemoeller said.
The Kremlin could simply take warheads out of storage and install them. Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst of Russian nuclear forces, said that’s likely to happen if the U.S. expands first. “It’s possible that they would frame it as: ‘The Americans are the bad guys. They are building up their forces. We reserve the right to respond the same way,’” he said.
Past treaties, especially New START, have helped Moscow and Washington to avoid these kinds of dangerous face-offs. The agreements didn’t bring about world peace, but they did provide each side with critical insight into what the other was up to. These kinds of restraints are why the world no longer faces the mountain of warheads built up during the Cold War. In a few days, the last restraint will be gone.
It’s true that New START’s demise has been foreshadowed. In-person visits under the treaty were disrupted in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, then permanently derailed in 2023 when Mr. Putin suspended his country’s participation because of U.S. support for Ukraine in the war. But Mr. Putin did pledge to adhere to the numerical warhead limits — and has said he’d like to continue to do so even after New START ends. Mr. Trump has inexplicably left that offer on the table without a meaningful response.
The treaty is far from perfect. It does not cover Russia’s sizable stockpile of so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which are shorter-range, nor does it cover Russia’s new and more exotic nuclear weapons, like the ocean-spanning Poseidon submarine drone. But it does still hold value. If nothing else, it keeps the United States and Russia talking at a time when they can’t agree on much else.
It’s strange that Mr. Trump has not taken up Mr. Putin on his offer for adhering to the treaty’s limits. The American president has long lamented the trillions of dollars collectively spent on nuclear weapons by the world’s superpowers. At times, he has used the eye-popping price tag to appeal to Moscow and Beijing to come together and reduce arms.
The Trump administration should counter Mr. Putin with a proposal for a one-year extension plus a restoration of on-site inspections. Not only would that bring the two countries back inside the treaty’s original terms, it would also offer some time to build confidence and diplomatic space to forge a new agreement.
It could help reassure a rattled Europe that the United States is still committed to upholding existing norms and treaties, even those that have fallen out of favor in recent years, and lengthen the timeline for compelling China to the negotiating table on a future deal.
It would also just be good politics. A recent YouGov poll of 1,000 U.S. registered voters found 91 percent in favor of either maintaining current limits on nuclear weapons or continuing to reduce the United States’ and Russia’s arsenals. Even if Americans don’t know New START by name, they recognize it as a useful tool at a time when the larger rules-based international order is unwinding before our eyes.
The world has come too far to allow the progress of the past half-century to slip away. Without a new agreement, each side’s military is forced to plan for the worst. There’s a window of time to act. It might be closing fast, but it’s worth trying.
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