The New START Treaty limiting U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arms, negotiated by the Obama administration and ratified in 2011, was designed with a 10-year term and an option to renew for five additional years. The Biden administration opted to extend the treaty shortly after it entered office, which meant it was due to expire last week.
For the past several months, as the treaty’s expiration date approached, arms control proponents, seeking to persuade the Trump administration to continue to abide by the limits of the expiring New START treaty, have been warning that the treaty’s end will set off a new “nuclear arms race.” Building on those fears, the mouthpieces of Russian President Vladimir Putin, including Sergey Lavrov and Dmitry Medvedev, have taken to the media to amplify that claim. However, both the domestic and Russian doomsayers are quite wrong: The end of New START, rather than creating a new competition in nuclear weapons, can create a safer and more stable world.
New START was conceived, signed, and ratified at the height of the post-Cold War holiday from history. It was the first bilateral agreement in the arms control era that allowed the two sides to potentially increase the number of treaty-accountable weapons agreed to under the Bush administration’s Moscow Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) of 2002. That treaty committed both sides to a range of 1,700 to 2,200 deployed warheads. In fact, Russia was enabled to actually build up its number of launchers to reach New START’s limits.
But, back in 2011, Russia was not considered much of a military threat, China was essentially only a trading partner, and the international security environment appeared generally stable. Today’s world is vastly different and far more dangerous. In the years between the treaty’s entry into force and today, Russia has rebuilt its long-range nuclear arsenal and added several thousand shorter-range systems aimed at U.S. allies in Europe and the Pacific; invaded and occupied Crimea; and launched an unprovoked murderous, bloody assault on Ukraine marked by attacks on civilians and domestic infrastructure.
Beijing, for its part, in addition to declaring a “friendship without limits” with Moscow (redolent of the Hitler-Mussolini “Pact of Steel”) has embarked on a major campaign to enlarge its nuclear and conventional forces; expanded its military buildup on artificial islands it has created in the South China Sea (which it deceitfully pledged never to militarize); and routinely sends navy and coast guard ships into the waters of American allies in the region.
By 2023, it had become evident that to prevent coordinated or opportunistic aggression by Moscow and Beijing, the United States needed to be capable of deterring Russia and China simultaneously. That judgment by the congressionally mandated, bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission in 2023 was supported by the congressionally mandated Commission on National Defense Strategy in 2024 and has now become a pillar of U.S. national security policy. However, New START’s limits of 1,550 warheads and 800 deployed and nondeployed launchers (ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers) constrain America’s strategic nuclear forces to levels that were needed in 2011’s arguably less dangerous circumstances—but below what it is required today.
No wonder, then, that Putin and his henchmen sought to keep the United States bound by those outdated force levels and even now seek to convince the Trump administration to remain within the now-expired treaty’s limits.
Notwithstanding the perilous new world described above, arms control proponents are convinced that the U.S. will spark an arms race if it eschews the terms of the expired treaty.
But those fears are not realistic. For starters, the U.S. has few options for expanding its nuclear stockpiles. It has not deployed a single new strategic nuclear platform in the last 15 years, and modernization efforts have been sluggish. But also, concerns about an arms race rest on the assumption that Moscow and Beijing plan their nuclear forces on what the United States has done and is doing rather than on what is needed to fulfill their own pre-existing military plans. We know that is not true. Careful study of the nuclear strategic arms competition at the height of the Cold War established that ideological, budgetary, and bureaucratic factors explained Soviet decisions on armaments better than a purported action-reaction arms race model.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s program responds to his desire to become the military, political, and economic hegemon in the Pacific. China’s aims for its future nuclear force structure are absolutely and deliberately opaque. It has provided no insights into its force level goals or its ultimate force objectives, as it views calls for transparency as a sign of weakness and prefers to keep potential adversaries guessing. (It has indicated clearly, however, its disdain for joining any arms control discussions now or in the future.) We can be certain that New START has had little effect on Chinese force planning and therefore on its ultimate force goals. China will build a force of whatever level Xi demands, likely a level that makes it a nuclear peer of the United States, but this cannot be ascribed in any way to New START’s demise.
Over the past 15 years, meanwhile, Putin has completely rebuilt Russia’s long-range nuclear triad of strategic submarines, land-based missiles, and bombers. He also sponsored the development and deployment of three advanced strategic nuclear systems designed explicitly to evade New START’s limits, while at the same time overseeing the buildup of several thousand short- and medium-range nuclear systems to intimidate and target U.S. allies (and U.S. forces stationed on their territory). We can be confident that Putin’s modernized nuclear forces are sufficient to support his political and military goals.
While Moscow will undoubtedly trumpet its ability to enlarge Russia’s nuclear forces, its ability to do so is heavily constrained to go beyond the already comprehensive modernization it has undertaken for the last decade and a half. Russia’s expenditures on its conventional forces for the war in Ukraine have weakened its economy and left little to spend on nuclear forces. Sanctions on its oil trade have further undercut Putin’s financial ability to build and deploy new strategic nuclear systems. While Russia may indulge in uploading warheads above and beyond its military requirements to its ICBMs and SLBMs in an attempt to intimidate Western governments, doing so will not increase U.S. deterrence requirements measurably as uploading does not add to the targets Washington needs to hold at risk.
The United States lags behind Moscow’s and Beijing’s massive modernization and expansion over the last 15 years. A much-touted “triad modernization program” announced in the early 2010s—intended to replace forces built 40 years ago under the Reagan administration and nearing the end of their designed service lives—has moved slowly through the Pentagon’s sluggish acquisition system. The new B-21 bomber will not be deployed until later in this decade. The first new Columbia-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines began construction in 2020 but won’t be deployed until 2031. The troubled Sentinel ICBM, intended to replace the Minuteman III originally deployed in the 1970s, will not begin service until well into the 2030s.
That means America’s only recourse for adding warheads to remedy the deficit created by the simultaneous deterrence challenge is making modest adjustments to its force by transferring several hundred existing warheads from storage in our nondeployed stockpile. That would entail adding warheads to existing Ohio-class submarine missiles and to Minuteman ICBMs, but it won’t happen quickly: The New START treaty forced modifications to those submarines that will have to be undone to accommodate the Trident missiles. All of this will take time and is hardly the stuff of an “arms race.” Nevertheless, it is time to get moving. In addition to restoring Tridents and adding warheads to the Minuteman force, the U.S. should expedite the deployment of new technologies being developed—the Columbia-class submarines, the B-21 bomber and the Sentinel ICBM program.
Moscow will not negotiate seriously unless it sees new U.S. strategic systems that it fears or seeks to limit become operational. This applies equally to Moscow’s bloated arsenal of several thousand short- and medium-range nuclear systems. The 2011 U.S. Senate resolution of ratification of New START directed that any future arms control treaty with Russia cover all nuclear systems—not only long-range ones. Moscow has resisted every U.S. effort since then to discuss this because the U.S. has not created any new regional deterrent weapons.
One of the enduring lessons of the arms control diplomacy of the Cold War is that if Washington truly seeks a new arms agreement that would successfully constrain all Russian systems, including theater systems with which Moscow is once again threatening our allies in Europe, it needs to accelerate development and deployment of the proposed nuclear sea-launched cruise missile and contemplate developing a nuclear-tipped or dual capable ground-based midrange ballistic missile, in effect a Pershing III.
Those who believe that forgoing development of these systems or delaying the uploading of U.S. strategic forces for another six months will provide Moscow with an incentive to negotiate a new agreement ignore the record of the past 15 years and are guilty, at best, of willful self-deception. Putin will regard such U.S. restraint as a lack of will and resolve and will act accordingly, and China will have no incentive to, at long last, agree to join the process of negotiating meaningful limits on its nuclear weapons programs.