The Kremlin is at odds with the West over the war in Ukraine, Europe is in the midst of a rapid conventional rearmament campaign, and U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to field more atomic weapons – and even revive the long-dormant practice of testing nuclear arms.
So New START, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, has expired at the worst possible time.
As of early February, after nearly six decades of agreement over limits on nuclear weapons, the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear arsenals have been left without agreed-upon common terms of strategic stability, and face the danger of a renewed, unfettered arms race.
Why We Wrote This
The last arms control treaty between the United States and Russia has expired, but no one really wants an end to arms control. Rather, they want to change it to account for new technological, geopolitical, and diplomatic realities – which isn’t easily done.
Still, the end of New START, negotiated during a period of U.S.-Russia rapprochement in 2010, may be part of a shift on arms control that many parties saw as needed, if not inevitable. Most experts agree that the old, bipolar Russia-U.S. paradigm has outlived its usefulness as China builds its own arsenal and other nuclear players become factors, and that a new paradigm will need to be found.
“We need to address the political relationships [between powers and], find new channels of communication, information sharing, and confidence-building,” says Dmitry Suslov, an international affairs expert with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
A shattered paradigm
The era of arms control, initiated in the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, certainly limited nuclear stockpiles: Warhead tallies in Russia and the U.S. have decreased from around 60,000 warheads in 1986 to about 12,000 today, largely as a result of decades of hard-nosed bargaining.
But it did much more than that. The various treaties signed over the years generated a durable process for the two powers to discuss a range of issues, verification measures including on-site inspections and regular consultations, and other confidence-building steps.
With all those safeguards on the verge of being lost with the last treaty’s demise, Mr. Trump recently agreed to restore a channel for high-level U.S.-Russia military contacts, which had been dropped by the Biden administration in 2021.
Russia blames the U.S. for dismantling the framework of arms control over the past couple of decades, and seeking to unleash its technological superiority to impose strategic dominance. Igor Korotchenko, a leading Russian military expert, says Mr. Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” antimissile shield, a revival of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative, has forced Russia to find asymmetric means of maintaining its deterrent.
“Trump wants to talk with us from a position of strength, but this will not work with Russia,” he says. “We will find ways to maintain the military balance.”
For its own part, Russia is rolling out a menagerie of exotic new nuclear-capable delivery systems designed to ensure Russia is capable of a crushing retaliatory strike in even the most uncontrolled strategic environment.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Russia will abide by the START limits as long as the U.S. does, and most experts say that a renewed, all-out arms race is unlikely to break out in the near term. In Moscow, where it is well remembered that the costs of strategic competition with the U.S. contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, there seems a touch of dismay at seeing the long era of arms control come to an end. Besides limiting the costs and dangers of nuclear rivalry, arms control negotiations were the only venues where Russians sat at the table with Americans and talked as equals.
“In the context of the war in Ukraine, Russia has serious constraints on its ability to upgrade its strategic systems. Its resources are badly strained just now,” says Pavel Devyatkin, a Moscow-based expert with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank. “At least in the short term, the Russians will probably try to keep up this narrative that they are the responsible party, trying to revive the arms control process.”
A lasting need for arms control
Russia still holds out hope that Mr. Trump might extend the terms of New START for another year. But even if that doesn’t happen, the proliferation of nuclear-weapons powers has changed basic strategic calculations.
Even if Russia and the U.S. still hold about 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads, the U.S. no longer appears to regard Russia as a peer.
In particular, China’s growing strategic nuclear arsenal has become a major concern. Mr. Trump has suggested that any new arms control deal should be in a trilateral format – the U.S., Russia, and China – something that’s regarded as a nonstarter in both Beijing and Moscow.
Russia has countered that Britain and France, with their modest nuclear arsenals, should be included in any expanded arms control effort. But those two European states, which recently agreed on greater coordination and upgrading of their nuclear capabilities in the face of a perceived Russian threat and loss of reliable U.S. strategic support, have shown little interest in that idea.
“The U.S. clearly doesn’t want any new bilateral deal with Russia,” says Mr. Suslov, the international affairs expert. “They insist on including China, and the Chinese have made clear that idea is unacceptable. Moscow has said it respects the Chinese position. Beyond that, it would complicate Russia-China relations to elevate China to the same level as Russia in strategic negotiations with the U.S. So, although Moscow would like to see a new, binding arms control accord with the U.S., it doesn’t look like one is on the horizon.”
Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP/File
Experts say the main challenges of the coming period will be to forestall a runaway arms race and find new forms of dialogue to defuse tensions and enhance strategic stability. In something of a departure from the official Moscow line, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – whose administration negotiated New START with the U.S. – recently remarked that “No [new deal] is better than a treaty that only masks mutual distrust.”
Mr. Suslov says that “arms control is just an instrument that controls a specific aspect of great power rivalry, but does not deal with the basic issues of the confrontation. … Today the threat of nuclear war comes not so much from a surprise first strike by one side, as from the danger of a conventional conflict escalating into a nuclear one.”
But the benefits bestowed by decades of hard-won arms control will be sorely missed, says Mr. Devyatkin.
“The world has been a much safer place because of arms control,” he says. “And despite all the current animosity, there is no excuse for not seeing the logic of negotiating to limit nuclear weapons. After all, arms control isn’t something you do among friends, it is part of the adversarial relationship, and we need to find ways to get back to it.”
