The latest nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia will end not with a bang, but with a quiet whimper. This was the assessment of the "New York Times" in connection with New START (New Strategic Arms Reduction and Limitation Treaty), which expired today, BTA writes in a review of what happened.
The Trump administration has said almost nothing about the expiration of the New START treaty today, a day that will mark the end of half a century of cooperation between the world's two largest nuclear powers. Nor have prominent lawmakers in Congress said much about its end this year, despite the looming threat of an unrestricted arms race involving China.
"Perhaps the most high-profile attempt to raise awareness of the end of this era – that has guaranteed national security for most of us – took place on January 14. In the early afternoon, several Democrats took turns on the House floor, delivering speeches for about an hour about the new world we are about to enter – a performance that even the most ardent spectators may have missed,––, the "New York Times" points out.
The only thing more troubling than the lack of interest in this issue among our elected representatives is the mounting pressure on the Trump administration – both from within and without – to increase nuclear weapons stockpiles, rather than reduce them, the newspaper notes.
After the treaty expires, we will return to an era without restrictions, in which arsenals can reach unlimited sizes. The gloomy prospects prompted the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" a few days ago to move its metaphorical Doomsday Clock another notch towards "midnight" - or global catastrophe. Now it is closer than ever: 85 seconds to midnight.
Recently, the world's superpowers agreed that reducing the number of nuclear weapons is a good thing. For decades, the world's nuclear stockpiles have been declining. In 1986, there were about 70,400 warheads; today they are 12,500 - a reduction that is the result of years of ongoing negotiations between Washington and Moscow. What began in 1969 with the start of negotiations on limiting strategic arms led to a series of agreements that culminated in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which entered into force in 2011 and was extended in 2021 for another five years, the newspaper recalls.
New START limited each country's arsenals to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads - long-range weapons deployed on submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers - and required regular data exchanges and notifications on the number and status of each country's weapons, which are subject to reporting under the treaty. It also allowed for on-site inspections at short notice to ensure compliance with the treaty.
The end of the New START treaty is just the latest Cold War-era treaty to be abandoned or scrapped amid deteriorating relations between the United States and Russia, the New York Times noted. When President Trump returned to the White House, many hoped he would finally revive nuclear arms control talks after years of diplomatic stalemate. The president has repeatedly said he is willing to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, and in August he even said he would seek complete "denuclearization" if Russian President Vladimir Putin was willing to reciprocate.
Declarations are not matched by actions
For all his nonproliferation rhetoric, Trump's actions tell a different story. He has reduced the number of diplomats working on the nuclear program at the State Department. In October, he openly discussed resuming nuclear testing, which would be a significant change from the U.S. government’s decade-long moratorium. And when the New York Times asked Trump in January about the upcoming expiration of the New START treaty, he replied: “If it expires, it expires. We’ll make a better deal.”
This is wishful thinking. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, there has been little sign of life in Washington and Moscow on arms control. In fact, the Trump administration may be heading in the opposite direction: In recent years, the U.S. military has been studying what it would take to add additional thermonuclear warheads to the long-range missiles already in the U.S. arsenal. Currently, each of these missiles carries a single warhead, but they could carry two or more, each aimed at different targets, thanks to a technology called MIRV (Multiplely Guided Interoperable Warhead).
The United States removed the last MIRV from its missiles in 2014, in part to comply with the New START treaty. Without the treaty, missiles with multiple warheads could be prepared for redeployment. With Trump’s approval, the Pentagon could remove the nuclear warheads currently in storage and install them on 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on standby and underground in five Great Plains states.
Not long ago, such a strategy, known as "uploading," would have been met with derision as a relic of the past. But as Russia continues to modernize its nuclear forces and China pursues a major expansion of its nuclear capabilities, the case for America to add more nuclear weapons has gained political momentum. While China has far fewer warheads (about 600) than the United States or Russia (about 3,700 and 4,300, respectively), it is adding them at a rate not seen since the Cold War, and there are no publicly known plans to stop. Beijing has also never signed an agreement limiting the size of its arsenal, the newspaper noted.
However, yesterday, once again, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that any nuclear arms control agreement with Russia must include China, reported Agence France-Presse. "The President (Donald Trump) has made it clear in previous statements that to achieve true arms control in the 21st century, it is impossible to act without the participation of China because of its significant and growing arsenal," Rubio told reporters.
Hawks in the US government believe that deploying as many nuclear weapons as Russia and China have combined would keep both countries in check. The easiest way to do that is by adding more weapons, but that would take time and money.
Rose Gottmoeller, the chief U.S. negotiator for the New START treaty, said Russia would be able to adapt to a post-treaty world much more quickly than the United States. Moscow has never stopped deploying cluster munitions. "They could get ahead of us in a weapons deployment campaign while we're still struggling to secure the technical means to start deploying existing missiles," she said.
The Kremlin could simply take the warheads out of storage and install them. Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst of Russian nuclear forces, said that would likely happen if the U.S. were to expand its arsenal first. "You could frame it this way: 'The Americans are the bad guys. They're expanding their arsenal.' We reserve the right to respond in kind," he said.
Previous treaties, especially New START, helped Moscow and Washington avoid such dangerous confrontations. The agreements did not bring world peace, but they provided each side with critical information about the actions of the other. It is precisely these limitations that are the reason why the world no longer faces the mountain of nuclear warheads accumulated during the Cold War. The last limitation, however, is already gone...
It is true that the end of New START was predicted. Inspections under the treaty were suspended in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then were finally terminated in 2023, when Putin suspended his country's participation due to the US support for Ukraine in the war. But Putin has committed to respecting the quantitative limits on nuclear warheads and has said he would like to continue doing so even after the New START treaty expires. Trump, inexplicably, left that proposal on the table without a meaningful response.
The treaty is far from perfect. It does not cover Russia’s significant stockpile of so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which have shorter ranges, nor does it cover Russia’s new and more exotic nuclear weapons, such as the Poseidon submarine-launched drone that can cross the ocean. But it still matters. If nothing else, it keeps the US and Russia talking at a time when the two sides can’t agree on much else.
It is strange that Trump did not accept Putin’s offer to stick to the treaty’s limits. The US president has long complained about the trillions of dollars the world’s superpowers spend on nuclear weapons. He has sometimes used the shocking cost to urge Moscow and Beijing to come together and reduce their armaments.
The Trump administration should respond to Putin with a proposal for a one-year extension of the treaty and the restoration of on-site inspections. This would not only return the two sides to the original terms of the treaty, but also provide time to build trust and diplomatic space to conclude a new agreement.
This would help reassure a worried Europe that the US is still committed to upholding existing norms and treaties, even those that have been ignored in recent years, and would extend the deadline for forcing China to sit at the negotiating table for a future agreement.
It would also be good policy. A recent YouGov poll of 1,000 registered voters in the United States found that 91 percent favored maintaining current limits on nuclear weapons or continuing to reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals.
The world has come too far to let the progress of the past half century slip away. Without a new agreement, each side’s military is forced to prepare for the worst. There is a window of time to act. It may be closing fast…
So today, February 5, New START, the last such treaty between the United States and Russia, expired. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Washington and Moscow will begin deploying more than the 1,550 strategic warheads the treaty calls for; both sides must abide by the old limits for some time, and they probably will. However, this moment is important, Bloomberg points out.
For the first time since the icy Cold War, there will be no formal arms control regime to limit the two nuclear superpowers. Thus, the expiration of the New START treaty is another step away from a world in which great powers were limited by rules and toward a new world of anarchy in which the only rules are the whims of the powerful, Bloomberg notes.
Strategic Own Goal
Few traces of the previous era remain on paper. Some 178 countries still adhere to a multilateral treaty that bans explosive (as opposed to computer-simulated) tests of nuclear or thermonuclear bombs. And 191 countries are still signatories, at least in theory, to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), in force since 1970. Among the signatories are the five powers with the largest nuclear arsenals, which in Article VI explicitly commit to negotiate "in good faith" to achieve "general and complete disarmament".
In practice, none of these long-standing promises is worth the paper it is written on. US President Donald Trump and several of his advisers are considering resuming nuclear testing. That would trigger competing rounds of testing by China, Russia and others and would amount to a strategic own goal.
And Article VI of the NPT has become a joke. Instead of negotiating disarmament, all nine nuclear powers, including the five recognized in the NPT, are "modernizing" their arsenals. For example, the United States is expected to spend a staggering $1.7 trillion over 30 years to modernize its nuclear missiles, submarines, bombers and warheads. China is increasing its arsenal as fast as it can, aiming to reach functional parity with the United States and Russia within a decade. North Korea (which left the NPT in 2003) is also increasing its stockpile, recalls "Bloomberg".
Even worse, most nuclear powers are simultaneously investing in increasingly exotic nuclear weapons - for example, for use in outer space or mounted on decoy torpedoes or "floating" carriers, as opposed to conventional ballistic missiles. As during the Cold War, they are once again including tactical nuclear weapons (which New START does not regulate at all) in their plans and scenarios.
Tactical nuclear weapons are bombs that can have "lesser" power and be launched at shorter ranges, at least compared to strategic weapons, which are designed to destroy entire enemy cities. The theoretical purpose of tactical weapons is to win battles in a regional war, not to destroy the enemy in a total nuclear holocaust.
Tactical nuclear weapons are inherently destabilizing, as Jeff Wilson, Christopher Preble and Lucas Ruiz of the Stimson Center have shown, Bloomberg notes. Their proponents like to argue that these bombs, because of their limited radioactive contamination, are "more usable". But that is precisely the problem. Once the nuclear taboo is broken, the idea that further escalation can be controlled is a "mirage", as George Shultz, a former secretary of state, once told Congress.
For starters, all nuclear powers would have what is known as a distinction problem. Faced with an offensive attack, they would not know whether they were being attacked strategically or tactically. According to the twisted logic of "use it or lose it", countries would feel they had to launch their own weapons while they still could.
Bloomberg also notes that the so-called Doomsday Clock is now closer to midnight than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
What should be done about this failure? Some experts and parts of Trump’s MAGA movement have concluded that the United States, on the one hand, should accelerate its nuclear program and expand its arsenal to respond to a coordinated attack from Russia and China.
This is not logical at all, says Richard Fontaine, a former national security official and diplomat who directs the Center for a New American Security.
Paradoxically, even policies that are purely defensive can make the situation worse rather than better. Trump’s beloved "Golden Dome" is an example of this, Bloomberg points out.
A continental missile shield - even if it were technically feasible and affordable, which it probably isn’t - could lead to disaster. America’s enemies would fear that the United States would feel protected from retaliatory strikes once the dome’s interceptors in space become operational. Then they would be tempted to destroy those interceptors and sensors with nuclear explosions in space. Or they could plan attacks that don’t go through space – with submarines or drones, for example. Whatever their response, America and the world would be less safe, not safer.
Trump is wrong
Trump is wrong about other things, Bloomberg points out. By insulting America’s allies in Europe and Asia, he is calling into question the protection of America’s "nuclear umbrella" and forcing them to consider building their own nuclear weapons. That would encourage their regional adversaries to do the same. More nuclear forces always mean more risk; take the number of times India and Pakistan have come to the brink of war, for example.
Yet Trump understands the big picture as well as any of his predecessors. He has repeatedly called nuclear weapons the world’s greatest existential threat. “There’s no reason to build new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” he has said; “You could destroy the world 50 times, 100 times. And we build new nuclear weapons, and they build nuclear weapons,” Bloomberg points out.
The only way to reduce this existential threat is a return to negotiations, ideally three-way talks between Washington, Moscow and Beijing, with other nuclear powers eventually joining in. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whether sincere or not, has made it clear that he would be open to negotiations. China's Xi Jinping has so far made it clear that he is not ready for negotiations, because his goal is to achieve parity with the other two. That is what Trump should try to change. He claims that he has good chemistry with Putin, so he should use it - but without bringing the fate of Ukraine into the conversation, Bloomberg emphasizes.
Russia's position
The termination of the New START Treaty does not mean "immediate catastrophe", but it should keep us on our toes, said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, in an interview with TASS, Reuters and the "WarGonzo" project.
"I don't want to say that this [the expiration of the treaty] immediately means a catastrophe and will start a nuclear war, but it should still worry us. And it is precisely these clocks that are ticking that in this case clearly need to be sped up again," Medvedev noted.
According to the deputy chairman of the Security Council, counting the number of warheads and deployed delivery vehicles is a way to control the situation, "but not to solve the problem as a whole." "Still, this is a way to check each other's intentions," he added.
The existence of this treaty is an element of trust, Medvedev pointed out.
"If you want, in a way, even at all costs, this is still an element of trust. When there is such a treaty, there is trust. And when there is no such treaty, it means that trust has been exhausted. And in fact, the fact that we are now in such a situation is evidence of a crisis in international relations. This is absolutely obvious", Medvedev noted.
Moscow's position has not changed. Yesterday, the Kremlin's foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told journalists that Russia would act carefully and responsibly after the expiration of the New START treaty with the United States, which limits the strategic nuclear arsenals of both countries, Reuters reported.
"As you know, on September 22, 2025, we proposed to the Americans to extend the basic quantitative limits for one year within the framework of voluntary self-restraints. However, an official response from the Americans never followed," the adviser said. "We remain open to finding ways to negotiate and ensure strategic stability", Ushakov noted.
What's next?
The era of nuclear arsenal control will end this week after the last legal control on the size of deployed nuclear weapons of Russia and the United States expires, the "Financial Times" emphasizes.
The New START treaty, which limits the number of operational missiles and warheads in the world's two largest nuclear arsenals, has expired. With prospects for future negotiations looking bleak, this potentially opens a new era of nuclear risk politics between the great powers.
"I sincerely believe that we are now on the verge of a new arms race," said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the "Carnegie Endowment". "I don't think there will be another treaty in my lifetime that limits the number [of operationally deployed missiles and warheads]."
The treaty's expiration ends more than half a century of Moscow and Washington trying, with varying degrees of mistrust, to limit their respective arsenals - an effort that lasted from Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in 1972 to the 1985 talks between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at a lakeside villa in Geneva.
"You can't have a treaty that's better than the overall status of your relationship. So the fact that there's no treaty is a reflection of what's going on" in the broader US-Russia relationship, said Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, according to the Financial Times.
Vasily Kashin, a professor at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, said Moscow had little interest in increasing its arsenal while maintaining strategic parity with the US.
"We are happy with the current situation and our security here is already guaranteed. Why start an arms race and spend additional funds on it? We don't need it, because we already have an advantage," Kashin said, the newspaper noted.
"The expiration of New START is not related to New START. "It's a broader trend of distrust and disinterest in arms control in general," said Matt Korda, deputy director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, according to the Financial Times.
But... But it's unlikely that Beijing will consider arms control until it reaches parity with the United States.
"China's nuclear weapons are Trump's problem, not ours," Kashin said. "Talk that the United States needs to be as strong as Russia and China combined is what could trigger a new arms race," the Financial Times quoted him as saying.