Something very dangerous is on track to happen this Thursday.
In two days, New START, the last significant survivor of the age of nuclear-arms-control agreements that began in the 1960s, will come to an end. Donald Trump—a president who claims to be very concerned about “nuclear,” his odd, one-word appellation for all things relating to nuclear weapons—has decided to let the treaty lapse. In July, Trump said that New START was “not an agreement you want expiring,” but last month he backtracked: “If it expires, it expires.”
The New START agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, in force since 2011, puts caps on the number of American and Russian “strategic” weapons, the long-range missiles and bombers that can cover the thousands of miles between North America and Eurasia. It is the last in a line of treaties that helped stabilize the relationship between the superpowers during the the tense years of the Cold War, and then provided the framework for serious reductions in nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. On Thursday, the two largest nuclear powers will be free to begin a new arms race, a needless competition that both nations have managed to avert for decades.
Indeed, even the Russians think the treaty should be renewed. Moscow suspended its participation in the treaty’s ongoing processes (such as information exchanges) back in 2023 as part of the diplomatic sparring with the U.S. over Ukraine, but the Russians have nonetheless offered to abide by the treaty’s numerical limits for one more year. The Trump administration has shown little interest in even this much. As the nuclear-arms researcher Pavel Podvig noted last week, “the US expert and political community has essentially reached consensus on the need to expand the US strategic arsenal.”
Podvig isn’t exactly right here: The U.S. nuclear establishment—the web of think tanks, contractors, and industries that make and support nuclear weapons—almost always favors the creation of more and newer weapons. (I worked for one such contractor decades ago.) Plenty of other experts and political leaders, of course, would contend that building more nuclear weapons is a very bad idea, but they’re not advising this White House. As in his first term, Trump is surrounded by people who oppose most treaties, regarding them as little more than annoying limitations on American power, and who view arms-control agreements as a sign of weakness. The secretary of the Navy even wants to put nuclear weapons on Trump’s proposed new battleships, a dangerous Cold War policy that was abandoned by George H. W. Bush more than 30 years ago.
New START is a good treaty, but it did not merely leap into being when it was ratified back in 2010. The progenitor of START was SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, begun by Richard Nixon. The SALT Treaty, a major achievement signed in 1972, also put limits on missile-defense research. (A follow-up treaty, SALT II, foundered during the renewed tensions of the late ’70s and early ’80s.) As the Cold War wound down and the Soviet Union’s days grew short, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev optimistically rechristened the SALT process “START,” replacing the word limitation with reduction, an idea first proposed by Ronald Reagan in 1982.
The cuts that followed were dramatic: The superpowers in the 1980s had a total of some 20,000 warheads pointed at each other on strategic delivery systems. Thousands more were mounted on short-range aircraft and missile systems all over Europe, as well as on surface warships. START slashed these numbers, setting a limit for each side of 6,000 warheads on no more than 1,600 delivery platforms. The process hit a dead end when George W. Bush withdrew from the missile-defense portion of the old SALT agreement and the Russians balked at signing an updated version of START. But Bush instead proposed another agreement: SORT, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. Signed in 2002 by Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, SORT had no provisions for verification, and set only an approximate goal for each side to reduce their inventories to 1,700 to 2,200 deployed strategic warheads by 2012, when SORT would expire.
In 2010, Barack Obama presented the replacement for SORT, New START, to the Senate, where GOP hawks blocked it until Obama agreed to spend tens of billions of dollars for future nuclear-modernization programs—in effect a shakedown for the nuclear-weapons industry in exchange for ratification. But the deal was worth it: New START was a better treaty that included stronger verification procedures and a new limit of 1,550 warheads each. It also included somewhat simplified counting rules that made it easier for both sides to stay in compliance: A bomber that could carry many weapons, for example, counted as only one warhead, because which delivery system carried the bombs was less important than keeping the total below 1,550—a level that both nations achieved.
I studied nuclear weapons back in the mid-’80s; I even took a course in nuclear technology at MIT to make sure I was able to understand the technical details. (I once could calculate things such as “equivalent megatonnage,” but those formulas, like my old slide rule, are long forgotten.) If you had told me in 1985 that one day the Soviet and American strategic arsenals would be down to 1,550 warheads each, I—and most Cold Warriors—would have laughed out loud. And yet here we are, because of the work done to negotiate and ratify New START and its predecessors.
Trump, however, now claims that he wants a “better” treaty that would also include Chinese forces. China has already rejected the idea, but no matter: Trump’s demand to include China is almost certainly a poison pill meant to stop any progress on renewing the existing treaty. Bilateral arms treaties are hard to achieve; multilateral arms treaties are exponentially more difficult.
What happens next may depend, as so much does in this White House, on whatever happens to strike Trump as a good idea. Both sides could merely leave things alone for the moment, which would be the least destructive option for now. But controlling nuclear weapons is about more than observing numerical limits. Regular meetings, inspections, and exchanges of information build trust and relationships that can come into play during times of uncertainty or crisis. Treaties alone do not keep the peace. (The year after SALT was signed, for example, the Soviets and Americans faced off in a dangerous crisis during the 1973 Yom Kippur War that ended with the United States putting its nuclear forces on alert.)
A more likely outcome is that Trump will sign off on more money for more nuclear arms. Such an expansion would be pointless; the United States has more than enough nuclear firepower to deter both Beijing and Moscow. Put another way, America has the ability to destroy both the Russian and Chinese governments and most of their infrastructure with a relative handful of weapons. More bombs will not lead to more security. As Emma Belcher, the president of the arms-control organization Ploughshares, put it to me in an email, failing to replace New START would “contribute to greater geopolitical instability, escalated tensions across the world and a higher likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe in our lifetime.”
Deterrence and international stability, as we should have learned during the Cold War, are not solely about technology and numbers but about will, commitment, the strength of alliances, and, most of all, the fear of a nuclear cataclysm. Trump said during a 2015 primary debate, “I think, to me, nuclear is just the power. The devastation is very important to me.” If the president cares so much about what he once called the “biggest problem” in the world, he has an opportunity to do something about it before Thursday.
