The New START arms control treaty between the US and Russia is due to expire on February 5, the last remaining Cold War-era bilateral agreement limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.
Negotiations have been ongoing between the White House, and the Kremlin renewed the deal in the first week of US President Joe Biden re-election in 2021, but talks with the Trump administration have gone nowhere, despite the US president’s insistence that he wants to reduce the number of nuclear missiles in the world.
The original START treaty (START I) was first signed on July 31, 1991, by US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. It was negotiated during the 1980s and was part of the broader arms control efforts of the Cold War era. In the post-Soviet-era it was then renewed in Prague in 2010 by then-US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to much fanfare..
The treaty limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. It also allows for mutual on-site inspections and data exchanges to verify compliance — measures that arms control experts say are vital for maintaining transparency and reducing the risk of miscalculation.
The agreement was extended for five years by Biden, who has also long been a proponent for restarting the arms controls. Notably, Biden opposed former president George W Bush’s decision to cancel the ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) in 2002, which kicked off the dismantling of the international security architecture and has in effect launched a new low-watt arms race that is now starting to gather momentum.
However the Biden-Putin START treaty extension is now reaching its end amid heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow over the war in Ukraine, nuclear posturing and deepening mistrust.
“Without a replacement or extension, for the first time since 1972, there will be no limits on the US and Russian nuclear arsenals,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in a statement on January 25, referring to the beginning of the arms control deals that were signed by Richard Nixon and Mao in 1972, starting with the ABM treaty.
Efforts to begin negotiations on a follow-on agreement have faltered. The Kremlin suspended, but did not cancel, the deal in December 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine, in effect holding the door open for the deal to be revived.
The Trump administration has blown hot and cold on the idea of restarting talks. The US State Department said in December that it remained open to “discussions without preconditions,” but Moscow has signalled that talks cannot proceed while it is still in a proxy war with Nato, as the Kremlin sees it.
The Kremlin jumped at the opportunity to renew the START treaty in 2021 and immediately suggested reviving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INS Treaty) that was unilaterally cancelled by the US in 2019 during Trump’s first term in office.
Reportedly reviving the Cold War-era missile agreements was one of the items discussed by Putin and Trump at the Alaska summit on August 15, and the Kremlin has made it plain that it would like to return to the Cold War set up. But as the East-West clash continues, both sides are becoming increasingly intransigent. As a result, experts have just moved the second hand on the Doomsday Clock a little closer to midnight as the world sleepwalks towards a cataclysmic disaster.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov stated earlier this month that “constructive dialogue is hardly possible while the US continues its confrontational policies.”
Inspections under the treaty were suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and have not resumed. Russia formally suspended its participation in the treaty due to Western support for Ukraine and alleging that Washington was using the treaty to “gain unilateral advantages.” The US has accused Moscow of violating the terms by refusing to allow inspections.
The New START treaty is the last survivor of a series of arms control agreements that once defined US–Soviet and later US–Russian relations. Previous treaties, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the ABM Treaty, have all collapsed in recent years amid allegations of non-compliance and strategic divergence.
Biden administration officials were openly keen to revive the deals, warning that the absence of constraints could spark a new arms race. “Even at the height of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union recognised the value of limits on nuclear weapons,” said Bonnie Jenkins, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, during a speech in Geneva in November.
Russia is also keen but insists that any deal must include the involvement of other nuclear powers such as China and the UK. The US, while acknowledging the need for broader multilateral engagement in the long term, insists on only bilateral limits between just Russia and the US.
As bne IntelliNews has argued, the Kremlin’s desire to revive the Cold War security structures represent leverage the West could use in the ongoing Ukraine ceasefire discussions, but one that has not been utilised. One of the unintended consequences of the war in Ukraine is it is likely to promote nuclear proliferation as Nato’s reluctance to engage directly with Russian forces in Ukraine and to stringently stick to its “escalation management” strategy of supplying Ukraine with “some, but not enough” money and materiel has made it clear to the rest of the world that the only way to ensure the West will not use military force against you is to have the bomb.
This is a lesson that has not been lost on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in particular who is now receiving Russian nuclear technology as part of a new security deal signed with Russia last year as part of the developing CRINK (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) military-industrial alliance. Iranian parliamentarians have also called for Tehran to build a bomb.
With the expiration date approaching, analysts say the lack of dialogue raises the risk of a complete breakdown in strategic stability. “The world is entering a dangerous new phase without verifiable constraints on nuclear arsenals,” said Kimball.
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