After START’s end, Russia and US diverge on arms control’s future
The Kremlin is at odds with the West over the war in Ukraine, Europe is in the midst of a rapid campaign of conventional rearmament and US President Donald Trump is threatening to deploy more atomic weapons – and even revive the long-dormant practice of nuclear weapons testing.
Thus, New START, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, expired at the worst possible time.
At the beginning of February, after nearly six decades of agreement on nuclear weapons limits, the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals in the world found themselves without agreement on common conditions for strategic stability and faced the danger of a new unfettered arms race.
Why we wrote this
The last arms control treaty between the United States and Russia has expired, but no one really wants to end arms control. Rather, they want to modify it to take into account new technological, geopolitical and diplomatic realities – which is not easy to do.
Yet the end of New START, negotiated during a period of rapprochement between the United States and Russia in 2010, could be part of a shift in arms control that many parties saw as necessary, even inevitable. Most experts agree that the old Russian-American bipolar paradigm has outlived its usefulness as China builds its own arsenal and other nuclear actors become factors, and that a new paradigm will have to be found.
“We must address political relations [between powers and]finding new channels of communication, information sharing and trust building,” says Dmitry Suslov, international business expert at the Moscow Higher School of Economics.
A broken paradigm
The era of arms control, initiated in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, has certainly limited nuclear stockpiles: the number of nuclear warheads in Russia and the United States has declined from about 60,000 warheads in 1986 to about 12,000 today, largely due to decades of hard-fought negotiations.
But it did much more than that. The various treaties signed over the years have generated a sustainable process for the two powers to discuss a range of issues, verification measures including on-site inspections and regular consultations, and other confidence-building measures.
With all these guarantees about to be lost with the failure of the latest treaty, Mr. Trump recently agreed to reestablish a channel of high-level military contacts between the United States and Russia, which had been abandoned by the Biden administration in 2021.
Russia accuses the United States of dismantling the arms control framework over the past two decades and seeking to unleash its technological superiority to impose strategic dominance. Igor Korotchenko, a leading Russian military expert, says Mr. Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile shield, a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative, has forced Russia to find asymmetric means to maintain its deterrence.
“Trump wants to talk with us from a position of strength, but that won’t work with Russia,” he said. “We will find ways to maintain the military balance.”
For its part, Russia is fielding a menagerie of exotic new nuclear-capable launch systems, designed to ensure that Russia is capable of a crushing retaliatory strike in even the most uncontrolled strategic environment.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said Russia will respect START limits as long as the United States, and most experts say a new all-out arms race is unlikely to break out in the near term. In Moscow, where it is well remembered that the costs of strategic competition with the United States contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, there seems to be a hint of dismay that the long period of arms control is coming to an end. In addition to limiting the costs and dangers of nuclear rivalry, arms control negotiations were the only forum where the Russians sat at the table with the Americans and talked as equals.
“In the context of the war in Ukraine, Russia faces serious constraints in its ability to modernize its strategic systems. Its resources are currently under strain,” says Pavel Devyatkin, a Moscow-based expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank. “At least in the short term, the Russians will likely try to maintain the narrative that they are the responsible party, trying to restart the arms control process. »
An enduring need for arms control
Russia still hopes that Mr. Trump will extend the terms of the New START treaty for another year. But even if this does not happen, the proliferation of nuclear powers has changed fundamental strategic calculations.
Although Russia and the United States still hold about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, the United States no longer appears to view Russia as a peer.
In particular, China’s growing strategic nuclear arsenal has become a major concern. Mr Trump has suggested that any new arms control agreement should be concluded in a trilateral format – United States, Russia and China – which is seen as a failure in both Beijing and Moscow.
Russia countered that Britain and France, with their modest nuclear arsenals, should be included in any expanded arms control effort. But these two European states, which recently agreed to greater coordination and improvement of their nuclear capabilities in the face of the perceived Russian threat and the loss of reliable American strategic support, have shown little interest in the idea.
“The United States clearly does not want a new bilateral agreement with Russia,” says Mr. Suslov, an expert in international affairs. “They insist on including China, and the Chinese have made it clear that this idea is unacceptable. Moscow has said it respects the Chinese position. Beyond that, elevating China to the same level as Russia in strategic negotiations with the United States would complicate Russian-Chinese relations. So while Moscow would like to see a new binding arms control agreement with the United States, it does not appear that such an agreement is on the horizon.”
Press Service of the Russian Defense Ministry/AP/File
Experts believe that the main challenges of the coming period will be preventing an uncontrolled arms race and finding new forms of dialogue to defuse tensions and strengthen strategic stability. Deviating somewhat from Moscow’s official line, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – whose administration negotiated the New START treaty with the United States – recently remarked that “no [new deal] is better than a treaty which only masks mutual distrust.
Mr. Suslov says that “arms control is only an instrument that controls a specific aspect of great power rivalry, but does not address the fundamental questions of confrontation. … Today, the threat of nuclear war comes not so much from a surprise first strike by one side as from the danger of a conventional conflict escalating into a nuclear conflict.”
But the benefits of decades of hard-won arms control will be sorely missed, Devyatkin said.
“The world has become much safer because of arms control,” he says. “And despite all the current animosity, there is no excuse for not seeing the logic in negotiations to limit nuclear weapons. After all, arms control is not between friends, it is part of an adversarial relationship, and we must find ways to get back to it.”
