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The last remaining U.S.–Russia nuclear arms–control treaty, New START, expires on Feb. 5—and, with less than 48 hours to go, President Donald Trump hasn’t done anything about it.
Asked about the impending deadline in his New York Times interview last month, Trump replied, “If it expires, it expires. We’ll do a better agreement,” maybe one that brings in China—which has a growing nuclear arsenal—as a participant.
If past is precedent, a new treaty would take at least a year to negotiate; if China takes part, something that has never happened before, it would take many years.
In the meantime, we may well see the renewal of a nuclear arms race, reversing a trend of the past half-century. The stunning thing is that, by all accounts, Trump and his advisers haven’t so much as held a conversation about the possibility or its implications for U.S. policy or the safety of the world.
It’s worth recalling that when Trump scuttled the Iran nuclear deal back during his first term as president, he said that he—master of the “art of the deal”—would goad Tehran into accepting a “better” deal. This never happened. There is no reason to believe, especially given Washington’s tense relations with both Moscow and Beijing, that he’ll bring about a superior substitute for New START either.
New START—the acronym stands for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—was signed by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in February 2011, as a follow-on to previous accords, START and START II, which George H.W. Bush had signed with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, respectively. The Obama–Medvedev treaty went further than the earlier accords, forcing each side to cut its long-range nuclear arsenals to 1,550 warheads—a 30 percent reduction from START II’s limits, a 75 percent cut from START’s. It also allowed very intrusive on-site inspections of each side’s arsenals to verify that they were in compliance.
New START was set to expire after 10 years. Obama envisioned negotiating, well before then, a follow-on accord that would make still deeper cuts, including short- and medium-range missiles. But it never happened. The U.S. had long ago dismantled almost all of those weapons, for good reason, while Russia retained about 2,000, which it wanted to keep to counter NATO’s superiority in conventional armies (just as, during much of the Cold War, the U.S. and NATO kept thousands of nukes in Western Europe to counter the Soviet Union’s conventional edge). Plus, after Putin returned as Russia’s president and started rattling sabers in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere, the political climate for arms control chilled.
So when Joe Biden came to the White House in January 2021, New START—which he had worked on as Obama’s vice president—was about to expire. The treaty did allow a one-time five-year extension, so he and Putin quickly made it so.* Diplomatic channels were still very much open (Putin wouldn’t launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine for another year); both leaders saw it in their interests to keep a cap on a possible arms race.
Now five years have passed, and here we are. Putin recently proposed a quick accord—it could be drawn up and signed in very short order—to extend New START’s ceilings on nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and warheads for another year. Trump has not replied, at least not in public.
Here’s why this is important: A major purpose of arms control is to put boundaries on the threat—to keep each side from spinning and acting upon “worst-case scenarios” of how many nukes the other side might build and, therefore, how many nukes it needs to build in response.
For instance, in the late 1950s, the intelligence branch of the U.S. Air Force estimated that the Soviet Union would have 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1962, maybe by as soon as 1961. By contrast, the U.S. would have just 65 ICBMs. In other words, there would soon be a “missile gap.” As a result, the Pentagon proposed, and Congress readily approved, our own crash buildup of missiles (which would be built by the U.S. Air Force).
Then, in 1960, photos taken above the USSR, first by U-2 spy planes and then by Discoverer spy satellites, revealed a different story. Independent intelligence analysts at the CIA estimated that the Soviets would have just 50 ICBMs in the next couple of years. In reality, the Soviets turned out to have just four ICBMs. There was a missile gap, but very much in the United States’ favor.
However, by this time, the Pentagon had already embarked on its crash missile buildup. Air Force officers were still arguing they needed 2,000 ICBMs over the long haul. White House aides to President John F. Kennedy argued that the new intelligence data suggested the nation could get by with just 600. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Kennedy that, as a political compromise, to keep the Joint Chiefs of Staff from rebelling, he needed 1,000. Kennedy, who at the time was inclined to side with his Cabinet secretaries, approved 1,000.
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As a result, the Soviets, seeing this American buildup, responded with a very real buildup of their own. Had there been better information, a more bounded threat, the arms race of the missile age might have been squelched before it took off.
The parallels with current times aren’t precise. Intelligence analysts don’t have to rely so much on guesswork. Even without on-site inspection, they can learn or infer a great deal—almost everything—from high-resolution satellites, communications intercepts, and a wide range of technical and human sources. (In 2023, Putin stopped allowing on-site inspections, but the U.S. still has very high confidence that he hasn’t deployed more nuclear weapons than New START allows.)
Still, one can easily imagine even today’s officers and analysts with vested interests or hawkish inclinations arguing that, freed from the restraints of New START, the Russians could build many more missiles and warheads—and, therefore, we need to build many more to match. It’s even easier to imagine Russian officers and analysts, who tend to be more paranoid than ours, doing the same. A stepped-up arms race is likely indeed.
This action-reaction complex stems not just from a psychological need to appear equal (though that is part of what goes on). There’s a tangible element here too. The planners at U.S. Strategic Command—and probably their counterparts in Russia—maintain a “counterforce” strategy. Most of our missiles are aimed at their missiles—and, most likely, vice versa. The warheads on our missiles also have sufficient accuracy and explosive power to destroy or disable the Russian missiles in their blast-hardened silos—and, again, most likely vice versa.
By the logic of this strategy, if the Russians build more missiles, we have to build more missiles too—so that we’re still able to hit all of the targets.
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This is where the new dimension of arms-race scenarios comes into focus—China. When Obama and Medvedev signed New START 15 years ago, China barely had enough nuclear weapons to warrant attention. Now they have about 600; within a few years, they’ll approach parity with the U.S. and Russia. Nobody quite knows why; Chinese officers, who used to write a fair amount about nuclear strategy, have gone silent. Whatever the motive, if China is seen as an adversary, and if counterforce is still a centerpiece of U.S. nuclear strategy, then we don’t have enough warheads to cover all of the targets.
This is why some defense analysts say it’s just as well that New START is expiring. They say that the U.S. needs more nuclear weapons than New START permits.
But this is where the discussion should begin, not end. Do we really need to be able to destroy all of the Russian and Chinese missile sites? This is a two-part question: First, what are the chances that we’ll face not just war but all-out nuclear war against Russia and China simultaneously? Second, do we need to have the ability to knock out all of their missile sites in order to deter nuclear war?
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Deterring nuclear war is the aim here. If the plan is to fight, maybe win a nuclear war, how does that game go? Would we launch a first strike against Russia and China? If we did, and we aimed to destroy their missile silos, would they launch the missiles on warning, before our warheads struck—in which case, they’d inflict more damage on us than might otherwise be the case? Finally, there’s “nuclear winter“—the theory that a certain number of nuclear explosions (the calculations vary, but some are as low as a few hundred) will ignite so many fires and kick up so much dust that much of life on Earth will end. There is no winner in this war.
These are controversies that have gone on for many decades. In previous administrations, the Pentagon, StratCom, the National Security Council, and sometimes the president himself, have engaged in this discussion. They have published a Nuclear Posture Review, in classified and unclassified forms, that spelled out the policy.
Trump has not done this. It is very unlikely that he or anyone else at a high level has discussed this at all, or is even aware of the dilemmas and imponderables. Nor is there likely to be a discussion of this sort in the next few years. In the meantime, Trump and Putin should sign a one-page document extending the terms of New START. It’s an imperfect accord, but it’s better than crying “Havoc!” and letting slip the dogs of a nuclear arms race.
Correction, Feb. 3, 2026: This piece originally misstated Obama’s exit date from office.
