The Tragic End of the New START Treaty

The Expiry of this Nuclear Arms Control Pact Is a Loss for the World, America, and Me

Today is a tragic day for global security, American security, and me personally. Today marks the end of the New START Treaty—the last major bilateral nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. With limitations on the buildup of strategic nuclear arsenal set to expire today, the world, including the United States, will become inherently more dangerous tomorrow.

The United States and the Soviet Union/Russia have a long history of nuclear arms control negotiations. The first arms control treaties, such as SALT I (1972) and SALT II (1979), slowed the expansion of both countries’ nuclear arsenals by imposing comprehensive limits on the number of silos, delivery vehicles, and warheads. The INF Treaty (1987) eliminated all land-launched ballistic and cruise missiles of a certain range—an entire class of nuclear weapons (the U.S. withdrew from this treaty in 2019; Russia followed). The first START Treaty, signed in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, was the first major treaty to require actual deep cuts in nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles, reducing both American and Soviet arsenals by around 80 percent.

The New START Treaty extended this tradition, reducing the number of nuclear weapons by roughly 30% worldwide. The New START Treaty limited the number of deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 and deployed delivery vehicles (heavy bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles) to 700. The treaty was signed by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, ratified by the Senate in December 2010, and entered into force on February 5, 2011. Of course, both the United States and Russia can still destroy the planet with their respective nuclear arsenals. But the fewer nuclear weapons there are in the world, the better.

My Stanford colleague Rose Gottemoeller was chief U.S. negotiator of the New START Treaty signed in 2010

With New START set to originally expire on February 5, 2021, Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin negotiated a five-year extension in January 2021, just days before the treaty was set to expire. While proposals to extend the treaty informally fluctuated in Fall 2025, there has been no credible attempt by either Putin or Trump to extend the current nuclear arms control regime.

Tomorrow, there will no longer be any limits on how many nuclear weapons both countries can deploy. That is an especially bad outcome because over the last decade, Putin has invested heavily in modernizing and developing new platforms to launch nuclear warheads, which he unveiled to the world in his famous address to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2018. While some systems fell within the New START treaty limits, others did not. With the emergence and rapid (ongoing) buildup of China’s nuclear arsenal, our military planners will now debate how many systems and weapons the United States will need to maintain mutual assured destruction (MAD), not with one but two nuclear powers. The United States has already reintroduced its submarine-launched cruise missile and is likely to add new systems. Therefore, American taxpayers will have to spend billions of dollars for weapons that should have only one purpose—deterrence. How many weapons are enough to maintain deterrence? Wouldn’t it be better to maintain that deterrence with 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons rather than 3,000? Or 5,000?

An equally significant loss from the expiration of the treaty is the end of the inspection regime (though Russia officially suspended its participation in New START in February 2023, halting on-site inspections and data exchanges with the U.S.). As of March 3, 2022, although paused in 2020 due to COVID-19, 328 on-site inspections and 23,369 exchanges have been completed between the strategic nuclear forces of the United States and Russia. The verification measures codified in New START were the most comprehensive of any arms control treaty and allowed both countries to gain knowledge about each other’s nuclear forces. In turn, this helped to keep the peace. History is checkered with examples of why uncertainty about an adversary’s capabilities is debilitating. If you do not know precisely what your enemy has in its arsenal, you must assume the worst and make your military plans accordingly. For the first time in several decades, that is the world we will be entering tomorrow. And no doubt the U.S. intelligence community will demand massive new budget increases to support their gathering of information about Russia’s nuclear weapons programs—data that could have been collected more easily and cheaply through the inspection protocols in New START.

In negotiating with the Soviets, Ronald Reagan famously quipped, “Trust but verify.” When I was in the U.S. government during the first five years of the Obama administration, I adapted Reagan’s saying to “Don’t trust, only verify.” The end of New START has just made this much harder.

Moreover, the end of New START means that the two world’s biggest nuclear superpowers are no longer upholding their part of the bargain, codified in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Signed in 1968, that treaty made a deal between nuclear and non-nuclear powers. The nuclear powers agreed to reduce their weapons systems in return for non-nuclear powers not seeking to build their own nuclear weapons. Of course, the deal did not work perfectly, but over half a century later, it is striking how few countries have deployed nuclear weapons. That could tragically change now.

What is odd about this moment is that President Trump and his team have pledged to develop a positive agenda with Russia. Trump has a much closer personal relationship with Putin than either Biden, Obama, or even Bush ever had. Negotiating a follow-up agreement to New START seemed like low-hanging fruit. But instead of sending arms control experts to Moscow, Trump keeps sending a New York real estate mogul. Doing economic deals with Putin for a small circle of the president’s associates seems more important to Trump than enhancing the security of all Americans.

Today’s expiration of the New START Treaty also feels like a personal loss because I participated in the negotiations while I worked at the National Security Council during the first three years of the Obama administration. The main stage for the treaty negotiations was Geneva, not Washington. My colleague at Stanford University, Rose Gottemoeller, headed our team there. You can read about those negotiations in her excellent book, Negotiating the New START Treaty. But for the heavy lifts in these negotiations, Obama had to become our lead negotiator, working directly with his counterpart, President Dmitry Medvedev. As Obama’s advisor on Russia at the time, I worked closely with the president’s main advisor on arms control at the National Security Council—Gary Samore—to prepare Obama for these rounds of negotiations, which took place on numerous phone calls, but also at bilateral summits and side meetings at international conferences worldwide, including in London, Moscow, New York, Singapore, Copenhagen, and eventually at the signing ceremony in Prague.

Celebrating in the Oval Office after the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty

Obama was deeply engaged in the details of this treaty. He can tell you all about telemetry or special identification numbers on warheads. (He wrote his undergraduate thesis at Columbia on nuclear arms control.) Obama’s interest in the details allowed Gary and me to also get significantly involved in the substance of the treaty and the tactics of the negotiations. I loved it. It’s hard “to do” things in government. It’s much easier just “to be” in government. In 2009 and 2010, however, I felt I was really helping to do something very important for the world and my country. I will always remember 2010. As Gary and I drove with Obama in “the beast” (the president’s car) to Prague Castle for the signing ceremony with Medvedev on April 8, 2010, Obama was in a fantastic mood. He was waving to crowds and smiling the entire way. That was a feeling of real achievement. And Obama was elated once again when the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on December 22, 2010. That morning, I drove with Vice President Biden to the Capitol, where Biden presided in the Senate for the vote: 71 in favor, only 21 against. (We do not get many votes like that anymore.) Later that day, I joined the rest of our NSC New START team in the Oval Office to drink champagne with Obama—my first and only time drinking in that special place. Hours later, Obama flew off to Hawaii with his family for their winter break. There could not have been a better way to end 2010.

And now it’s all gone.