FT: A world without nuclear arms control begins this week

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The New Start treaty, which caps the number of operational missiles and warheads in the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals, terminates on Thursday. With the prospects for future talks looking dim, it potentially opens a new era of great-power atomic brinkmanship, ‘Financial Times’ notes.

The treaty cessation brings to a close more than half a century of Moscow and Washington attempting, with varying levels of mistrust, to limit their respective arsenals — efforts that have stretched from Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in 1972 through to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1985 talks at a lakeside villa in Geneva.

Signed in 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Start I treaty imposed the first significant limits on US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons and established an inspection regime that would provide a template for post-cold war arms control.

After a brief lapse, it was eventually succeeded by New Start, which was signed in 2010 and extended in 2021. This capped the number of nuclear warheads deployed by each country at 1,550 — more than enough to destroy each other and much of the world.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that both sides could voluntarily continue to adhere to current limits when it expires. Donald Trump, who has described his Russian counterpart’s proposal as a “good idea”, has yet to formally respond but suggested he would prefer “a new agreement that’s much better” with Russia and China.

Discussions over the treaty collapsed

Discussions over the treaty, signed in 2010 during then-US president Barack Obama’s ill-fated “reset” with Russia, collapsed.

Last year, Trump ordered the Pentagon to restart nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with Russia and China. It was not clear whether he was referring to explosive nuclear tests or the testing of weapons capable of delivering an atomic device.

“You cannot have a treaty that is better than the general status of your relationship. So the fact that there is no treaty is a reflection of what’s happening” more broadly between the US and Russia, said Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project.

Trump, who is known for his unpredictable style, could still issue a last-minute announcement that he intends to accept Putin’s offer to observe the treaty’s limits for another year.

Rose Gottemoeller, who was the chief US negotiator of the treaty as under-secretary of state for arms control, said it was a “no brainer” to accept Putin’s offer of a voluntary extension.

The US, she said, could end up in a weaker position if the two countries raced to add more nuclear warheads to their missiles and bombers. “The Russians can add warheads faster than we can,” she said.

Vasily Kashin, a professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, said Moscow had little interest in boosting its arsenal as long as it maintained strategic parity with the US.

“We are comfortable with where things are and our security here is already secured. Why should we set off an arms race and spend extra money on it? We don’t need to because we already have an advantage,” Kashin said.

The Americans only want inspections to learn Russian secrets

New Start also enabled a detailed verification and notification process intended to reduce the risk of the kinds of misunderstanding that can rapidly spiral to a nuclear crisis.

“The value of New Start was not in the caps themselves but in this whole system of inspections, data exchange and notifications. If we could get higher ceilings, but with all this machinery of transparency, that would be a good trade-off,” Podvig said. “It requires a fairly high degree of co-operation and trust and mutual respect. That is a good thing in this system.”

But the lack of trust around the suspended inspections and the war in Ukraine is compounded by new weapons not covered by the current agreement. Russia is developing advanced nuclear delivery systems like the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile and the Poseidon nuclear submersible, as well as hypersonic conventional weapons such as the Oreshnik ballistic missile.

“The expiration of New Start is not really about New Start. It is about a broader pattern of mistrust and disinterest in arms control in general,” said Matt Korda, associate director for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

…The United States' decision not to extend the restrictions established by the Strategic Offensive Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) beyond February 5 will not constitute a catastrophe for Russia, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko assured the media.

"Yes, we support compliance with all restrictions. But if the US chooses a different course, it will not be a disaster for us," he stated. "We remain confident. We have our own program in place, which will proceed as planned."

And one more thing.

If Trump wants to include China in the negotiations, he should also include France and Britain, and perhaps Israel. Otherwise, the negotiations will be one-sided.

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