Expiry of New START Raises Fears of Renewed Nuclear Arms Race
By Gwynne Dyer
The expiration of the New START nuclear arms control treaty has heightened concerns among arms-control experts about a renewed global nuclear arms race and the loss of decades of carefully negotiated safeguards.
Last September, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed extending the New START treaty for one year to allow additional time for negotiations on a replacement. The treaty, signed in 2010, limited the number of deployed nuclear warheads held by the United States and Russia and was widely viewed as a cornerstone of strategic stability.
The Trump administration did not formally respond to the proposal. In an interview with The New York Times, U.S. President Donald Trump said of the treaty, “If it expires, it expires. We’ll just do a better one.” New START has since expired, and there has been no public indication that negotiations on a successor agreement are underway.
New START capped each side’s deployed nuclear warheads at 1,550 and limited the number of delivery systems—missiles and bombers—to 800. It was the latest in a series of arms-control agreements dating back to the Cold War, including the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties of the late 1960s and 1970s and the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in 1991.
Those agreements followed periods of intense superpower tension, including the Cuban missile crisis, and were credited with significantly reducing the risk of nuclear conflict. At their peak in the mid-1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union together possessed more than 63,000 nuclear warheads. Today, the combined total held by the U.S. and Russia is estimated at about 11,000, including weapons in reserve or awaiting dismantlement.
Other nuclear-armed states—including France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea—collectively possess about 1,000 nuclear weapons. Analysts note that informal limits set by U.S.-Russian treaties helped shape the scale of those arsenals as well.
With New START no longer in force, those constraints have disappeared. Experts warn that the absence of formal limits increases the likelihood of arms races and strategic mistrust, as countries expand their arsenals in response to perceived threats.
Negotiating arms-control agreements is typically a lengthy and technically complex process. Critics argue that such efforts require sustained political attention and a detailed understanding of nuclear deterrence theory, something they say has been lacking in recent U.S. policy.
Concerns about presidential understanding of nuclear strategy were raised last August when Trump said he had ordered two U.S. nuclear submarines to be repositioned following comments by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Military experts note that ballistic missile submarines are continuously deployed at sea as part of standard deterrence operations.
With no replacement treaty in sight, analysts say the relative stability created by decades of arms control may be eroding, raising long-term risks for global security.