The Future of US-Russian Arms Control After New Start

The last remaining arms control treaty between Russia and the US, New Start, is set to expire in February 2026. Without a new agreement to take its place, the US and Russia are likely to engage in a new nuclear arms race, raising risk of a nuclear conflict.

The New Start treaty, signed and ratified by the US and Russia in 2010, is scheduled to expire on Feb. 5, 2026. It was extended once in 2021 for five years — the only extension permitted — and cannot be extended again. It is the last remaining vestige of a US-Russian arms control infrastructure crafted during the Cold War-era designed to reduce the threat of nuclear war. The US withdrew from other foundational arms control agreements, such as the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, citing changing national security priorities (ABM) or Russian noncompliance (INF) as the justification.

New Start caps the deployed strategic nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia at 1,550 warheads each, with additional limits of 700 deployed launchers and 800 total launchers. Once the treaty expires, both parties will be able to dramatically increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons simply by removing warheads currently in storage and mounting them on missiles whose warhead capacity had been downsized because of the treaty. In this way, the respective deployed nuclear arsenals of each nation could increase substantially in the span of a few months.

The destabilization that will be generated by this potential increase in the nuclear strike capacity will lead to new nuclear postures that will incorporate new missile defense systems, and new nuclear missiles designed to defeat these defenses — in short, an all-out nuclear arms race.

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, relations between the US and Russia went into a downward spiral. Inspections under New Start were suspended first by Covid-19 in 2020, then blocked by Russia in August 2022, citing sanctions and reciprocity issues.

And when the US announced that it had embarked on a policy designed to strategically defeat Russia in Ukraine, Russia suspended all treaty-related activity, including negotiations about a follow-on treaty framework to replace New Start, citing the incompatibility of limiting Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrence at a time when Russia’s major nuclear adversary was seeking its strategic defeat.

Such activity was then terminated altogether. While the Trump administration played lip service to the notion of renewed arms control talks, to date there has been no substantive movement in this regard. As such, on Feb. 5, 2026, New Start will expire, and there will be nothing to replace it.

Moratorium on Madness

On Sep. 22, during a meeting with the Russian Security Council, Russian President Vladimir Putin bemoaned the current state of the strategic framework between Russia and the US, noting that it “continues to deteriorate” because of the “destructive actions of the West” that have “significantly undermined the foundations of dialogue” between the two nuclear powers. Despite this desultory situation, Putin noted that “a complete renunciation of New Start’s legacy would, from many points, be a grave and short-sighted mistake.” Russia, Putin said, is “prepared to continue observing the central quantitative restrictions” of New Start for one year after its expiration if the US “acts in a similar spirit.”

In short, Russia would continue to abide, on a voluntary basis, with the caps imposed by New Start, if the US did the same.

However, Putin set down two issues he said must shape a new binding arms control agreement. First, the “overall strike potential of the [Nato] Alliance” would have to be factored into any discussion of caps on the number of nuclear weapons and their launchers. This meant that the nuclear arsenals of the UK and France would need to be on the table, something the US has been consistently opposed to since arms control negotiations began with the Soviet Union back in the 1960s. The assertive posturing of both the UK and France in relation to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, with both nations offering to extend their respective nuclear arsenals to encompass other Nato nations, makes their exclusion from any future agreement impossible from a Russian perspective.

Second, the US would need to halt the development and deployment of the so-called “Golden Dome” missile-defense initiative, which Russia criticizes as destabilizing, especially its proposed space-based interceptors. In his statements to the Russian Security Council, Putin cited US “preparations for the deployment of [missile defense] interceptors in outer space” as a step that would destabilize the strategic balance, making any moratorium of the New Start caps impossible.

The Atrophy of Diplomacy

On the surface, Putin’s willingness to voluntarily participate in a one-year moratorium on extending New Start caps on deployed nuclear warheads and delivery systems appears to pave the way for a replacement treaty vehicle covering strategic weapons. US President Donald Trump has, on several occasions, voiced support for New Start. In July, Trump said he would like to maintain New Start’s nuclear stockpile limits, declaring, “That’s not an agreement you want expiring,” adding that “when you take off nuclear restrictions, that’s a big problem.”

The problem is that the Trump administration, as it is currently configured, appears ill-prepared to engage in the kind of detailed negotiations necessary to the production of meaningful and verifiable arms control agreements. The US has not engaged in a substantive new arms control negotiation since 2010, aside from a 2021 pro-forma extension. Negotiations are the muscle of diplomacy, and by failing to engage with Russia in the kind of substantive talks necessary for any new treaty vehicle for more than two decades, whatever diplomatic muscle the US once had in this regard have long since atrophied, with experienced negotiators retiring, and support staff being reassigned. Moreover, the State Department fired more than 1,300 employees on Jul. 11 this year, many of them the very arms control and Russia area specialists the Trump administration would need to rely upon to carry the load in any potential arms control negotiation with Russia.

Void of any arms control-specific infrastructure within the State Department, the issue of managing the balance between the US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals defaults to the Department of Defense, whose leadership is more concerned about a growing Chinese nuclear threat that requires a matching US nuclear capability, as well as a decaying US strategic nuclear force structure in need of upgrading. The last thing these nuclear war planners want to engage in is negotiating a treaty that they believe leaves them at a strategic disadvantage to both China and Russia. Moreover, this is the very team that is pushing the Golden Dome program on Trump. Given this reality, the prognosis for a continuation of the New Start weapons caps, and for US-Russian arms control as a whole, is dire — the diplomatic equivalent of on life support.

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