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9:42 07.02.2026 •
The 2011 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, limited the size of the Russian and US nuclear arsenals and allowed for inspections and exchanges of information. Its demise leaves Moscow and Washington without a framework to regulate their strategic stockpiles for the first time since the depths of the Cold War in the 1980s, Bloomberg writes.
START is expiring as relations between Russia and Europe have spiraled to their worst in decades over the war in Ukraine and with uncertainty among US allies about its longterm commitment to the NATO military alliance. China is bolstering its strategic forces and other nations are eyeing the need for nuclear weapons to safeguard themselves as major powers increasingly jostle for dominance in their regions.
The treaty had been due to expire in 2021 before the two sides agreed to a five-year extension, though Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended formal participation in 2023, halting inspections and information exchanges as confrontation with the US surged over his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Still, he pledged to uphold the pact, which restricts each side to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads.
The immediate danger
“The immediate danger is that, in the absence of legal constraints and verification measures, both countries will revert to worst-case planning and begin uploading hundreds more warheads to their deployed forces out of fear that the other is doing so,” said Mackenzie Knight-Boyle, a senior research associate for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. “The United States and Russia have significant upload capacity that would allow them to drastically increase their numbers of deployed nuclear warheads in a short amount of time.”
In September, Putin said he’d be ready to adhere to the terms of the treaty for another year after it expired if the US did the same. US President Donald Trump didn’t formally respond to that idea.
Trump will decide the path forward on nuclear arms control and will clarify it in his own timeline, a White House official said. The president has spoken repeatedly of addressing the threat from nuclear weapons and indicated that he wants to involve China in arms control talks, the official added.
“China’s nuclear strength is by no means at the same level with that of the US,” Lin Jian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told reporters at a Feb. 3 briefing. “It is neither fair nor reasonable to ask China to join the nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.”
Russia is “free to choose their next steps”
Russia now assumes the two sides “are no longer bound by any obligations or symmetrical declarations within the context of the treaty” and are “free to choose their next steps,” the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said in a statement late Wednesday. Still, Moscow “remains open to the search for political and diplomatic ways to comprehensively stabilize the strategic situation,” it said.
Some Republican lawmakers privately urged Trump not to entertain Putin’s proposal, according to a person familiar with the matter, in light of the risk it would end up constraining the US’s ability to maneuver without doing much to limit Moscow’s actions.
At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, retired admiral Charles A. Richard, a former commander of United States Strategic Command, told lawmakers that “simply extending the New Start Treaty for one year does not constrain Russia to the same way that it constrains us,” and that doing so would prevent the US from meeting the challenge posed by China’s own rapid buildup.
Rose Gottemoeller, a former undersecretary of State for arms control in the Obama administration who was the chief US negotiator of the New START treaty, advocated for an extension, saying it would be better to “keep them limited at least for another year while we continue to plan and prepare for the Chinese threat.”
China – in, France and Britain – out
The People’s Liberation Army is on track to have more than 1,000 warheads by 2030 from a stockpile in the low 200s at the start of this decade, according to the Pentagon report.
Russia may indicate “a willingness to refrain from buildups until the United States increases its strategic arsenal,” said Dmitry Stefanovich, a research fellow at the Center for International Security at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow. Still, the absence of binding agreements between the nuclear powers creates “the foundation for an increase in strategic offensive weapons in the medium term,” he said.
An unconstrained nuclear era that led to increases in Russian and US weapons would likely prompt other states from the UK and France to North Korea and Pakistan to seek to increase their strategic arsenals, according to Knight-Boyle of the Federation of American Scientists.
Russian officials say negotiations on a potential new agreement would also have to cover the issues of North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion, the US global missile-defense system and medium- and short-range missile deployments.
…Westerners are constantly being cunning. This article doesn't mention the nuclear capabilities of France and Britain, but Bloomberg deliberately ignores this fact, misleading its readers.
This is a typical Western propaganda tactic: concealing objective information while emphasizing facts that benefit the West. In this case, China's nuclear capabilities. There will be no new treaty if the West continues to behave this way.
The United States has today buried the nuclear arms control potential created by its predecessors, who were personally familiar with the tragedy of World War II. Now, the people in power in the West are people who only watched movies and read books about the war, if they read anything at all.
And this is dangerous for the entire world – the complete incompetence of the Western elite!
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