The deadline has been looming over Washington and Moscow for years.
On Thursday, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expired. For the first time since 1972, it leaves both superpowers with no limits on the size or structure of their arsenals, at the very moment both are planning new generations of nuclear weapons and newly evasive means of delivering the deadly warheads.
Despite a new era of superpower confrontation, talks over a new treaty — or even an informal extension of the current one — never got off the ground, frozen by the war in Ukraine. When President Trump was asked in January why he had not taken up President Vladimir V. Putin’s offer for a one-year informal extension, he shrugged.
“If it expires, it expires,” he told The New York Times in an interview. “We’ll do a better agreement” after the expiration, he insisted, adding that China, which has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal, and “other parties” should be part of any future accord. The Chinese have made clear they are not interested.
On Thursday afternoon, after the New START treaty’s expiration, Mr. Trump reiterated his call for a new accord, denouncing the previous one as “a badly negotiated deal” and declaring on social media that “we should have our nuclear experts work on a new, improved, and modernized treaty that can last long into the future.” But he said nothing about agreeing with Mr. Putin to freeze American and Russian arsenals at current levels, leaving open the possibility of a renewed arms race.
In fact, the United States has been preparing for that possibility, and the Navy is already preparing to deploy more nuclear warheads on its biggest submarines. Meanwhile, Russia and China are now testing new types and configurations of nuclear weapons that few envisioned when the Senate, by a narrow margin, ratified New START in 2010.
Arms control was not supposed to end this way.
When President Richard M. Nixon signed the first arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, the banner headlines signaled a new era in which even the most hostile of Cold War rivals saw the danger of letting the arms race spin out of control.
Those early efforts had so many loopholes that the Soviet and American arsenals grew fast, peaking at roughly 62,000 nuclear arms in the late 1980s. But then the numbers fell, treaty by treaty. By 2009, President Barack Obama, speaking to thunderous applause in Prague, vowed to pursue “a world without nuclear weapons,” though he conceded the abolition might not come in his lifetime.
Few post-Cold War predictions have collapsed as dramatically as that one. As Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi, two of the nation’s leading nuclear strategists, who both served in the Biden administration, wrote recently: “Nuclear weapons are back with a vengeance.”
The evidence is everywhere, from Mr. Putin’s plans for undersea and space-based nuclear arms to Xi Jinping’s decision to abandon China’s “minimum deterrent” and build an arsenal clearly designed to rival those of Washington and Moscow.
Mr. Trump’s first-term vow to disarm North Korea pushed the reclusive nation in the other direction, and his second-term confrontations with Europe have led its leaders to wonder if they can count on America’s “nuclear umbrella” — the promise that Washington would come to the defense of nonnuclear allies if they ever came under nuclear attack.
Not surprisingly, they’re now talking about establishing nuclear forces independent of Washington’s.
Mr. Trump’s National Security Strategy, issued in December, barely touches on these new dynamics. Only the Pentagon’s annual report on Chinese military power cites its massive buildup — 600 weapons, on the way to more than 1,000 by 2030, according to U.S. intelligence estimates — and it skirts a more immediate danger: Mr. Putin’s repeated, barely veiled threats to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Mr. Trump is hardly the only one arguing that China needs to be part of any new arms control effort. As Beijing and Moscow maneuver in an uneasy cooperative effort to challenge the United States, a growing number of experts argue that the two nuclear superpowers could coordinate their nuclear strategy — ultimately prompting Washington to deploy hundreds of additional weapons.
Earlier this week, Mr. Obama, who pushed through New START, warned that the United States was about to “pointlessly wipe out decades of diplomacy, and could spark another arms race.”
Yet what stands out in Thursday’s expiration of the New START treaty is the lack of public discussion on the best way forward for American strategy, in contrast to how it once dominated presidential debates, policy arguments, newspaper headlines and Hollywood films.
From the 1950s to the early 1990s, every serious politician on the national stage was expected to be conversant in the subject. Henry Kissinger’s “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” was a best seller. “Dr. Strangelove” captured the nation’s deep anxieties.
While there are glimpses today of renewed concerns, there is little public discussion about whether the Trump administration is countering the reinvigorated nuclear threat or fueling it.
Still, in the arms control world, many agree with elements of Mr. Trump’s argument that New START aged poorly and that a new treaty needs added participants.
“You wouldn’t negotiate the same treaty again,” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear inspection body, said in an interview in the agency’s Vienna headquarters. “There are new technologies that are not covered by the treaty — hypersonic missiles, undersea nuclear weapons, space weapons. And there are many other countries that, for one reason or another, feel now as if they may need a nuclear arsenal of their own.”
Mr. Grossi, who is running for secretary general of the United Nations, was too diplomatic to name those nations. But Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Poland are among the nonnuclear weapon states now discussing whether they need to change course.
And the United States itself is doubling down. Washington is spending $87 billion this year on nuclear weapons, including a modernization of its warheads and a hugely expensive replacing of aging missiles and bombers. When Mr. Trump announced a new kind of warship known as the “Trump class,” he quickly added that the vessels would be armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles, similar to some of the weapons China and Russia are now developing.
“We’re seeing the end to an era of arms control,” said Erin D. Dumbacher, a senior security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Washington, she added, seems to have little interest in negotiating “something as big as a follow-on to New START.”
The Umbrella: How Washington Sparked an Age of Nuclear Restraint
In late 1945, just months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, J. Robert Oppenheimer issued a warning about a lesson he had learned in devising those atomic bombs for the Manhattan Project.
“They’re not too hard to make,” the suddenly famous physicist told his colleagues at Los Alamos, the lab in New Mexico that made the novel weapons. “They’ll be universal if people wish to make them universal.”
Oppenheimer’s worst fears did not materialize, nor did President John F. Kennedy’s grim prediction that by 1975 there could be up to 20 nuclear-armed states.
There are several reasons their predictions proved too pessimistic, but a central factor was the U.S. “nuclear umbrella.” While the United States helped two close allies — Britain and France — make small nuclear arsenals, the strategy of “extended deterrence” kept most American allies from building their own.
After the Soviet Union broke up, more than a dozen Central and Eastern European states joined the NATO alliance, and thus gained the protection of the American nuclear umbrella. All told, on and off, it covered nearly 40 nations.
To the surprise of doom-mongers, the policy helped keep the peace. Graham Allison, a Harvard political scientist who wrote the first major book about the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the Soviet Union and the United States came to a nuclear exchange, noted that “if you told anyone in 1945 that we’re going to see 80 years without another use of nuclear weapons in war, people would have said you’re out of your mind.”
Equally miraculous, he said, is that the world today has only nine nuclear-weapon states — the result of not only the umbrella but of a global nonproliferation system, overseen by Mr. Grossi of the atomic agency, that lets states develop peaceful nuclear power as long they agreed to never make atomic weapons.
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Of those nine, four have refused to sign or have renounced the nonproliferation treaty so that they could build their own arsenals: India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. (The other five were the “original” nuclear-weapon states: the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.)
Each of the nine adds, in different ways, to the global challenge of safely navigating the nuclear age. Even so, the numbers, and associated risks, are much smaller than what Oppenheimer and Kennedy foresaw.
The Disarray: How Trump Shook the Global Nuclear Order
In 1987, a New York real estate mogul by the name of Donald J. Trump decided to attack a central tenet of American foreign policy.
Our allies, he wrote in full-page ads taken out in The New York Times and other newspapers, should “pay for the protection we extend.” The financial result, he added, would end deficits, cut taxes and “let America’s economy grow unencumbered” by the need to defend rich foreigners.
Now, four decades later, his nationalist views appear to have hardened. And while Mr. Trump often speaks about the fearsome power of nuclear weapons, he has presided over the disassembly of some of the main nuclear restraints that have largely worked — with some near-misses — for eight decades.
As he did in those ads, Mr. Trump still portrays allies as freeloaders and has made clear that in an America First world, American safety and prosperity rank above defending foreigners. His National Security Strategy put it bluntly: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on whether he would use nuclear weapons to protect allies, although he has not formally renounced the American nuclear umbrella.
Just days after Mr. Trump’s famous televised argument with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office last February, President Emmanuel Macron of France warned that Europe needed to prepare for America’s retreat from its traditional defense commitments and rethink how it would face a belligerent Russia. Mr. Macron said he was willing to discuss extending the protection of France’s nuclear arsenal to its European allies, and Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, welcomed the possibility.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, held similar talks and said his nation had to drastically build up its military and even “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” And Mr. Zelensky has said it was a mistake to give up the weapons it held after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Early last month, as Mr. Trump’s threats to take over Greenland grew louder, Stockholm’s leading newspaper called for a joint Nordic nuclear arsenal independent of the United States.
“No one wants to discuss Swedish nuclear weapons,” it declared, “but we must.”
It is hard to know how serious the behind-the-scenes discussions are, and how much is mere talk, driven by nationalist politics or anger at Mr. Trump. But experts say as many as 40 nations have the technical skill, and in some cases the needed material, to build a bomb.
The question is whether they have the political will. Gideon Rose, a foreign policy expert at Columbia University and the Council on Foreign Relations, recently noted that the psychological barriers that bar proliferation “may already have fallen away.”
The Buildup: How Trump Bolsters the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal
Already, there are signs that the Trump administration is planning to break out of the numeric limits of the New START treaty — not dramatically, but in ways that could easily trigger a new arms race. Along the way, they will make the most deadly element of the American arsenal even more deadly.
That increase centers on the nation’s Ohio-class submarines. The undersea craft, 14 in all, are the largest in the American fleet. Each one is 560 feet long — longer than the Washington Monument is high.
Each submarine is built with 24 tubes that can launch missiles, and each missile carries up to eight nuclear warheads. They include some that are 30 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
To comply with the limits of New START, the Navy disabled four tubes on each sub. Now, relieved of those restrictions, plans are moving ahead to reopen the tubes — allowing the loading of four more missiles onto each sub.
For the Ohio fleet overall, that’s 56 more missiles and possibly hundreds more warheads, each of which can be aimed at a different target.
Mr. Trump has never discussed that plan, or given a speech on his nuclear strategy, although he signed an executive order to create a “Golden Dome” defense system meant to intercept rockets and missiles.
When he speaks on the subject of nuclear weapons, he talks about his determination that the United States remain dominant. As his security strategy put it, the nation must have “the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent.”
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” — Mr. Trump’s signature domestic legislation — includes the schedule for the Ohio submarine nuclear upgrades, saying the obligated funds should not be spent before March 1 — that is, a little more than three weeks after New START expires.
To Trump administration officials, this planned increase in deployed weapons puts foes on notice that, if they attempt a nuclear strike, the retaliation could be larger than at any time in years. But there’s a counterargument: America’s deployment of new weapons, and the Golden Dome if it ever gets off the drawing board, could fuel an arms race in which spirals of moves and countermoves raise the global risk of nuclear miscalculation and war.
Monica Duffy Toft, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University, noted recently that when one state tries to increase its security, “others often feel less secure and respond in ways that leave everyone worse off.” Arms control agreements, she added, “emerged precisely to dampen this dynamic.”
The Response: How U.S. Rivals Seek to Counter Washington
When New START was negotiated, it covered only traditional “strategic” weapons, which can be delivered to targets on the other side of the world by bombers, submarines and ground-launched missiles. And it had only two signatories, the United States and Russia. China was considered such a small player, with less than 200 weapons, that it was barely discussed as the treaty was debated in the Senate.
Today, the world looks very different. Russia is experimenting — and claims to be preparing to deploy — what experts call new kinds of “superweapons” that Mr. Putin began to announce in 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term.
In October, he announced a successful test of the Poseidon, an underwater drone meant to cross an ocean, detonate a thermonuclear warhead and raise a radioactive tsunami powerful enough to shatter a coastal city.
“There is nothing like this in the world,” Mr. Putin said, adding that no interception was possible. Pentagon analysts say Poseidon’s small nuclear reactor gives it a range of 6,000 miles and a speed of more than 60 miles per hour — much faster than any submarine.
For years, many experts dismissed Mr. Putin’s boasts about the Poseidon as bluster. But now the weapon appears to be real — as do his test launches to prepare for placing a nuclear weapon in space, a plan the Biden administration quietly warned Congress about two years ago. Both weapons could serve the same purpose: to defeat Mr. Trump’s Golden Dome.
Other concerns about Russia center on Mr. Putin’s repeated threats to use nuclear arms in Ukraine, eroding the taboo against wielding a nuclear weapon in a nonnuclear conflict. The most urgent fears arose in October 2022, when the Biden administration picked up intelligence that preparations for such a strike were underway. Emerging accounts of those events suggest it was a much closer call than officials acknowledged at the time.
China is also developing novel arms. In 2021, it fired a hypersonic missile into orbit that circled the globe — and flew over the continental United States — before deploying a maneuverable glide vehicle that could deliver a nuclear weapon anywhere on earth. Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the test “very close” to a “Sputnik moment” for the United States.
But for the time being it is the speed with which China’s conventional nuclear forces are growing that has seized the attention of Washington. A December report by the Pentagon stressed not only the increase in long-range weapons that could reach the United States but “highly precise theater weapons” that might be employed in a conflict over Taiwan — largely to keep the United States away.
Every effort by the Trump administration to engage China in some kind of discussion of its nuclear capabilities has been shut down by the Chinese, much as they refused to discuss the topic with Biden administration officials.
That leaves the United States with a choice: It can push ahead with larger arsenals and new, specialized weapons to keep pace with Beijing and Moscow, or negotiate a broader deal of the kind Mr. Trump talked about last month.
To give such talks a chance, “Trump should agree with Putin on a ‘strategic pause’ — and possibly extend it to two or three years,” Matthew Bunn of Harvard’s Belfer Center wrote recently. “He should also push Putin to include inspections.”
There is no evidence that will happen. Instead, strategists see a looming surge in moves and countermoves around the globe that could spark a crisis.
Richard L. Garwin, a nuclear expert who advised 13 presidents, concisely described the danger shortly before he died last year at age 97.
“It’s the number of nuclear weapons,” he said in an interview. “The threat is when you have so many.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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