New Start, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia, will expire today, ending five decades of legally binding limits on their stockpiles of weapons. With its demise at a time of surging global instability, the world faces the real prospect of the rapid resumption of a nuclear arms race already capable of destroying the world many times over.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, renewed once in 2010, limits the deployed strategic arsenal for each side to 1,550 warheads and the total number of delivery systems (missiles or bombers) to 800. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has suggested a year-long extension to Start . To no avail. US president Donald Trump signalled his readiness to dispense with it. “We’ll just do a better agreement,” he said. That, he believes, would have to involve, China which is rapidly growing its much smaller nuclear armoury.
New Start’s end could also threaten the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), due for review next year, under which states without nuclear weapons pledged not to acquire them, as long as the states with weapons made good faith efforts to disarm.
There were around 70,400 warheads in 1986, compared with 12,500 today – a reduction that came from years of continual negotiations between Washington and Moscow. At the same time, however, the perceived deterrence effect of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) has steadily and worryingly diminished. Increased proliferation of nuclear weapons to states like North Korea, Pakistan and Israel, has introduced new uncertainty and risk, while the development of tactical weapons has allowed dangerous talk of “limited” nuclear exchanges.
READ MORE
Trump’s planned Golden Dome missile defence system also threatens to diminish the deterrent effect of Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons, incentivising them to develop new systems to circumvent it. A new era of nuclear brinkmanship is an appalling prospect, but a clear risk unless the political will can somehow be found to avoid it.
