Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/us/politics/new-start-nuclear-arms-control.html

http://archive.today/2026.02.05-140835/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/us/politics/new-start-nuclear-arms-control.html

On Thursday, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expired. For the first time since 1972, it leaves both superpowers with no limits on the size or structure of their arsenals, at the very moment both are planning new generations of nuclear weapons and newly evasive means of delivering the deadly warheads.

Despite a new era of superpower confrontation, talks over a new treaty — or even an informal extension of the current one — never got off the ground, frozen by the war in Ukraine. When President Trump was asked in January why he had not taken up President Vladimir V. Putin’s offer for a one-year informal extension, he shrugged.

“If it expires, it expires,” he told The New York Times in an interview. “We’ll do a better agreement” after the expiration, he insisted, adding that China, which has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal, and “other parties” should be part of any future accord. The Chinese have made clear they are not interested.

Thursday marks more than an expiration date. The United States is preparing to deploy more nuclear warheads on its biggest submarines, and its rivals are now testing new types and configurations of nuclear weapons that few envisioned when the Senate, by a narrow margin, ratified the New START treaty in 2010.

The evidence is everywhere, from Mr. Putin’s plans for undersea and space-based nuclear arms to Xi Jinping’s decision to abandon China’s “minimum deterrent” and build an arsenal clearly designed to rival those of Washington and Moscow.

Mr. Trump’s National Security Strategy, issued in December, barely touches on these new dynamics. Only the Pentagon’s annual report on Chinese military power cites its massive buildup — 600 weapons, on the way to more than 1,000 by 2030, according to U.S. intelligence estimates — and it skirts a more immediate danger: Mr. Putin’s repeated, barely veiled threats to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Mr. Trump is hardly the only one arguing that China needs to be part of any new arms control effort. As Beijing and Moscow maneuver in an uneasy cooperative effort to challenge the United States, a growing number of experts argue that the two nuclear superpowers could coordinate their nuclear strategy — ultimately prompting Washington to deploy hundreds of additional weapons.

Just days after Mr. Trump’s famous televised argument with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office last February, President Emmanuel Macron of France warned that Europe needed to prepare for America’s retreat from its traditional defense commitments and rethink how it would face a belligerent Russia. Mr. Macron said he was willing to discuss extending the protection of France’s nuclear arsenal to its European allies, and Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, welcomed the possibility.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, held similar talks and said his nation had to drastically build up its military and even “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” And Mr. Zelensky has said it was a mistake to give up the weapons it held after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Early last month, as Mr. Trump’s threats to take over Greenland grew louder, Stockholm’s leading newspaper called for a joint Nordic nuclear arsenal independent of the United States.

It is hard to know how serious the behind-the-scenes discussions are, and how much is mere talk, driven by nationalist politics or anger at Mr. Trump. But experts say as many as 40 nations have the technical skill, and in some cases the needed material, to build a bomb.

Still, in the arms control world, many agree with elements of Mr. Trump’s argument that New START aged poorly and that a new treaty needs added participants.

“You wouldn’t negotiate the same treaty again,” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear inspection body, said in an interview in the agency’s Vienna headquarters. “There are new technologies that are not covered by the treaty — hypersonic missiles, undersea nuclear weapons, space weapons. And there are many other countries that, for one reason or another, feel now as if they may need a nuclear arsenal of their own.”

Mr. Grossi, who is running for secretary general of the United Nations, was too diplomatic to name those nations. But Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Poland are among the nonnuclear weapon states now discussing whether they need to change course.

When New START was negotiated, it covered only traditional “strategic” weapons, which can be delivered to targets on the other side of the world by bombers, submarines and ground-launched missiles. And it had only two signatories, the United States and Russia. China was considered such a small player, with less than 200 weapons, that it was barely discussed as the treaty was debated in the Senate.

Today, the world looks very different. Russia is experimenting — and claims to be preparing to deploy — what experts call new kinds of “superweapons” that Mr. Putin began to announce in 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term.

In October, he announced a successful test of the Poseidon, an underwater drone meant to cross an ocean, detonate a thermonuclear warhead and raise a radioactive tsunami powerful enough to shatter a coastal city.

For years, many experts dismissed Mr. Putin’s boasts about the Poseidon as bluster. But now the weapon appears to be real — as do his test launches to prepare for placing a nuclear weapon in space, a plan the Biden administration quietly warned Congress about two years ago. Both weapons could serve the same purpose: to defeat Mr. Trump’s Golden Dome.

Other concerns about Russia center on Mr. Putin’s repeated threats to use nuclear arms in Ukraine, eroding the taboo against wielding a nuclear weapon in a nonnuclear conflict. The most urgent fears arose in October 2022, when the Biden administration picked up intelligence that preparations for such a strike were underway. Emerging accounts of those events suggest it was a much closer call than officials acknowledged at the time.

China is also developing novel arms. In 2021, it fired a hypersonic missile into orbit that circled the globe — and flew over the continental United States — before deploying a maneuverable glide vehicle that could deliver a nuclear weapon anywhere on earth. Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the test “very close” to a “Sputnik moment” for the United States.

But for the time being it is the speed with which China’s conventional nuclear forces are growing that has seized the attention of Washington. A December report by the Pentagon stressed not only the increase in long-range weapons that could reach the United States but “highly precise theater weapons” that might be employed in a conflict over Taiwan — largely to keep the United States away.

Every effort by the Trump administration to engage China in some kind of discussion of its nuclear capabilities has been shut down by the Chinese, much as they refused to discuss the topic with Biden administration officials.

That leaves the United States with a choice: It can push ahead with larger arsenals and new, specialized weapons to keep pace with Beijing and Moscow, or negotiate a broader deal of the kind Mr. Trump talked about last month.

Yet what stands out in Thursday’s expiration of the New START treaty is the lack of public discussion on the best way forward for American strategy, in contrast to how it once dominated presidential debates, policy arguments, newspaper headlines and Hollywood films.