The Washington Post Cuts Signal an Industry Being Murdered by Its Billionaire Owners

The Post layoffs are not just about one newspaper—they are about whether journalism will continue to serve the public, or retreat further into a corporate shell.


The building of the Washington Post newspaper headquarters is seen on K Street in Washington DC on May 16, 2019.
(Photo by Eric Baradat/ AFP via Getty Images)

Nick Fulton
Feb 05, 2026

Common Dreams


On Wednesday, the Washington Post laid off roughly a third of its staff. For one of the most powerful and historically significant newspapers in the United States to make this decision is a warning to the entire journalism industry. At a moment of political instability, rising authoritarianism, and widespread distrust in institutions, corporate media is choosing contraction over responsibility.

Under the ownership of Jeff Bezos and his puppet publisher Will Lewis, the Post has joined a growing list of outlets responding to financial pressure by hollowing out their newsrooms. These layoffs arrive amid record-breaking, industry-wide cuts that have devastated local and national media alike. Across the country, journalists are losing jobs not because their work lacks value, but because truth telling has become inconvenient for corporate owners.

This erosion of journalism is not inevitable. It is the result of deliberate choices. Bezos, whose net worth hovers around $250 billion, has the resources to preserve jobs and protect institutional integrity. The decision not to do so makes clear that political influence matters more than the labor that sustains public accountability.

In 2019, Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul wrote, “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.” Journalism, like poetry, cannot be separated from the conditions under which it is produced. Reporters cannot meaningfully tell stories of joy, culture, or community while working under constant threat of layoffs, censorship, and corporate interference. The warplanes are not silent.

The future of journalism depends on resisting this erosion. It requires sustained investment in independent and nonprofit outlets, stronger labor protections for journalists, and a collective refusal to accept mass layoffs as the cost of doing business.

As newsrooms shrink, reporters are expected to do the impossible: Cover every breaking story, every election, every conflict, every scandal. What disappears in the process are the beats deemed expendable. Coverage of racial justice, gender equity, LGBTQIA+ communities, labor organizing, and social movements is often the first to be cut. These stories are not eliminated because they lack importance, but because they challenge power and unsettle funders.

The result is a media landscape increasingly shaped by what is safest for advertisers and political elites. More coverage of markets and institutions, fewer stories about Black culture. More horse-race politics, less reporting on trans survival or grassroots organizing. Corporate media follows the wind while ignoring the warplanes overhead.

This narrowing of journalism’s mission weakens democracy itself. A press that cannot afford to tell uncomfortable truths cannot fulfill its role as a public good. When newsrooms prioritize access over accountability and profitability over people, the public loses both information and trust.

Still, journalism is not finished. Independent and nonprofit newsrooms continue to do the work that corporate outlets are abandoning, producing community-rooted reporting that centers justice, accountability, and lived experience. But these outlets operate under immense financial strain, even as corporate media continues to set the terms of what is considered legitimate or newsworthy.

The future of journalism depends on resisting this erosion. It requires sustained investment in independent and nonprofit outlets, stronger labor protections for journalists, and a collective refusal to accept mass layoffs as the cost of doing business. It also requires reporters—especially students, freelancers, and those pushed out of traditional newsrooms—to keep telling the stories that power would prefer remain untold.

The Washington Post layoffs are not just about one newspaper. They are about whether journalism will continue to serve the public, or retreat further into a corporate shell. The industry can cover tragedy while preserving joy. It can hold power accountable while documenting resistance, survival, and hope. We should not accept anything less.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Nick Fulton
Nick Fulton is a Queer political media strategist and freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.
Full Bio >

‘This Is a Wake-Up Call’: Critics Disgusted as Billionaire Bezos Guts Washington Post

“Oligarchs are not the benevolent saviors media have long depicted them to be.”


Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos delivers remarks during the opening ceremony of the media company’s new location January 28, 2016 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Feb 04, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The Washington Post announced massive cuts to its newsroom staff on Wednesday, unleashing a wave of disgust directed toward its owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

As reported by Semafor reporter Maxwell Tani, Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray told staffers at the paper that it would be closing its sports department “in its current form,” and would also be “killing its book section, suspending its Post Reports podcast, restructuring its metro section, and shrinking its international footprint.”



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With hundreds of journalists expected to lose their jobs, Murray told Post employees that the cuts were needed to help the paper “become more essential to people’s lives” in “what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles to do that.”

Many critics, however, scoffed at claims that cuts at the paper were needed to make it profitable, suggesting the real motivation came from Bezos’ desire to take an ax to the US free press.

Brian Phillips, senior writer at The Ringer, rejected the notion that one of the richest men in the world couldn’t afford to keep what was once a revered newspaper fully staffed.

“Bezos isn’t destroying the Washington Post because it isn’t profitable,” he wrote in a social media post. “He’s destroying the Washington Post because he’s calculated that a robust free press threatens the ability of his class to warp society around their interests.”

Phillips also implored other journalists to not report on the Post layoffs as “a straightforward business story,” but rather “a story about coercive social transformation being imposed by people so rich they’ve ceased to see the rest of us as legitimate stakeholders in our own lives.”

David Sirota, founder of The Lever, said the layoffs should end journalists’ fantasies that billionaire owners will rescue journalism in an era of mass consolidation by corporate conglomerates, slashed newsroom budgets, and wave after wave of layoffs.

“The media world’s stunned/shocked reaction to the awful WaPo layoffs shows that even now, so many in journalism still can’t believe billionaires aren’t going to rescue them,” he wrote. “This is a wake-up call: Oligarchs are not the benevolent saviors media have long depicted them to be.”

Adam Serwer of the Atlantic also raised concerns about the power of wealthy oligarchs to buy and destroy historic media institutions.

“I personally do not think some rich man should be able to buy an institution like this like a toy and then break it when he doesn’t want to play with it anymore,” he wrote. “Bezos fucked the paper and instead of fixing it he’s destroying it despite the fact that he could spend the money to make things right without even noticing its absence.”

Jonathan Cohn, political director for Progressive Mass, noted that the Post isn’t the only media organization that’s being gutted by a billionaire owner, referencing billionaire Larry Ellison, a major donor to President Donald Trump, who recently acquired CBS News alongside other media properties.

“What we are seeing with WaPo and with CBS News is that the mega-rich see real financial value for themselves in destroying journalism,” he wrote. “Let that sink in.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a post written before the Post layoffs were announced, drew attention to billionaire control over not just traditional media, but social media as well.

“When we talk about authoritarianism, it’s not just Donald Trump,” wrote Sanders. “[Elon] Musk owns X. Bezos owns Twitch. [Mark] Zuckerberg owns Instagram and Facebook. Larry Ellison controls TikTok. Billionaires increasingly control what we see, hear and read.”

‘Regulators Should Remember’: Louisiana Pipeline Blast Shows Risks of Methane Boom

The explosion “starkly illustrates the dangers of fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly its impact on vulnerable communities,” one environmental justice leader said.


Delfin Pipeline explodes on February 3, 2026 in Cameron Parish, Louisiana.
(Photo by Trish Bargo via KPLC 7 News/ Facebook)

Olivia Rosane
Feb 04, 2026
COMMON DREAM

A pipeline explosion in Cameron Parish, Louisiana—a coastal community in the epicenter of the liquefied natural gas buildout—offers an object lesson in the immediate dangers posed by oil and gas expansion, frontline advocates warned.

The explosion occurred at around 11:00 am Central time on Tuesday on the Delfin LNG pipeline, injuring one worker, forcing nearby Johnson Bayou High School to shelter in place, and sending a wall of smoke and flame into the sky.

Community activist Roishetta Ozane of the Vessel Project of Louisiana said the blast “starkly illustrates the dangers of fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly its impact on vulnerable communities. This incident is a chilling reminder of the environmental injustice that disproportionately affects people of color, low-income populations, and especially fishermen.”

Environmental justice campaigners and local residents, including fishers, have been pushing back in recent years against an LNG export boom in the Gulf South that threatens their local ecosystems, health, and livelihoods—not to mention the stability of the global climate.

“Today’s explosion and ongoing fire are a stark reminder that what they’re selling is highly combustible methane gas—a volatile fossil fuel.”

“This is a prime example of why we are fighting against this,” Fisherman Involved in Sustaining Our Heritage (FISH) wrote in a post on Facebook in response to the news.

Cameron Parish is home to the largest LNG terminal in the country—Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass—as well as Venture Global’s controversial Calcasieu Pass terminal, which violated its air permits more than 2,000 times during its first year of operation. Residents say the pollution is harming their health and that dredging and export tankers are destroying habitat for local fisheries. The situation is only set to deteriorate, as last year the Trump administration approved construction of a second Venture Global terminal and allowed the company to increase exports from its first as part of its push to ramp up fossil energy production.

Delfin is part of the LNG expansion. It is constructing an offshore terminal consisting of three vessels connected to preexisting pipelines which will eventually be able to produce 4 million tons of methane gas. Preliminary actions were being performed on the line when it exploded Tuesday, Ashley Buller, assistant director of Cameron Parish’s emergency preparedness department, told The Advocate.

The cause of the explosion is not yet known, though the Louisiana State Police have promised an investigation, but for watchdog groups documenting fossil fuel expansion in the state, it does not come as a surprise.

“Every minute of every day, countless corporations pump oil, gas, and chemicals across Louisiana via pipeline. That means at any given moment, a Louisiana community could be faced with a leak; an explosion; or contamination of their air, land, or water,” said Anne Rolfes of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “The industry likes to use marketing terms like ‘natural gas’ to make their products seem benign, but today’s explosion and ongoing fire are a stark reminder that what they’re selling is highly combustible methane gas—a volatile fossil fuel.”

Ozane noted: “Fossil fuel pipelines pose significant risks due to leaks and explosions, exposing nearby residents to hazardous pollutants linked to severe health issues, including respiratory disorders and cancer. Often, these pipelines are placed in marginalized neighborhoods, a product of systemic inequities that prioritize corporate profit over community safety. The cumulative effects of pollution exacerbate existing health disparities, leaving these communities more vulnerable to chronic illnesses.”

“The dangers extend beyond immediate incidents,” she continued. “The entire lifecycle of fossil fuel extraction and consumption contributes to environmental degradation and climate change, disproportionately impacting marginalized groups. Furthermore, the rise of energy-intensive data centers, often powered by fossil fuels, adds another layer of pollution, perpetuating a cycle of harm.”

“They don’t only export the gas, they export the profits too.”

FISH also pointed to the lingering effects of fossil fuel pollution, and criticized the official line reported in local media that there were “no off-site impacts from the explosion,” calling it “one of the most disturbing industry lies.”

“The air, the water, and our wetlands are impacted far beyond their chain link fences,” the group wrote. “The people are not protected by chain link fences and concrete barriers.”

FISH executive director Robyn Thigpen also emphasized to The Advocate that Cameron Parish’s hospital had not reopened since it was damaged by Hurricane Laura in 2020, increasing the potential danger of pipeline explosions.

“It’s really important that people understand they never reopened a hospital,” she said.

The worker who was injured was transported to a facility in Port Arthur, Texas.

The climate crisis increases the chances of powerful storms like Laura and Rita, a 2005 hurricane which devastated the area and started a trend of long-term population decline, providing an example of how the fossil fuel industry threatens the people of Cameron Parish in multiple ways. Yet while it increases risks, the LNG boom has not brought greater prosperity to ordinary citizens of the parish.

“We are the largest exporter of natural gas in the world, and to look around this place, you would not know the wealth,” For a Better Bayou Director James Hiatt told The Advocate. “Because they don’t only export the gas, they export the profits too.”

Community activists called on local and national leaders to reassess their reliance on fossil fuel energy sources and move toward safer renewable alternatives.

“Before approving the next pipeline, LNG export terminal, or [carbon, capture, and storage] project, Gov. [Jeff] Landry and state regulators should remember today’s incident and what these projects cost our communities,” Rolfe said.

Ozane concluded: “Each explosion not only results in loss of life and property but also inflicts lasting trauma on families and communities. It is imperative to advocate for the cessation of new fossil fuel projects and demand clean energy alternatives. We must address the systemic inequalities that put vulnerable populations at risk, ensuring that no community is sacrificed for corporate gain.”

‘Making America Unsafe Again’: Alarm Over Environmental Review Exemption for Nuclear Reactors

“I think the DOE’s attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment,” said one expert.


Jessica Corbett
Feb 03, 2026

COMMON DREAMS


Less than a week after NPR revealed that “the Trump administration has overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public,” the US Department of Energy announced Monday that it is allowing firms building experimental nuclear reactors to seek exemptions from legally required environmental reviews.

Citing executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in May, a notice published in the Federal Register states that the DOE “is establishing a categorical exclusion for authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors for inclusion in its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing procedures.”

NEPA has long been a target of energy industries and Republican elected officials, including Trump. The exemption policy has been expected since Trump’s May orders—which also launched a DOE pilot program to rapidly build the experimental reactors—and the department said in a statement that even the exempted reactors will face some reviews.

“The US Department of Energy is establishing the potential option to obtain a streamlined approach for advanced nuclear reactors as part of the environmental review performed under NEPA,” the DOE said. “The analysis on each reactor being considered will be informed by previously completed environmental reviews for similar advanced nuclear technologies.”

“The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents.”

However, the DOE announcement alarmed various experts, including Daniel P. Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, who wrote on social media: “Making America unsafe again: Trump created an exclusion for new experimental reactors from disclosing how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and from a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident.”

Foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen described the policy as “terrifying,” while Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a scholar at the University of Sussex’s Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, called it “truly crazy.”

As NPR reported Monday:
Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have primarily existed on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real-world experience with the reactors means that they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before they’re built.

“The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents,” Lyman said.

“I think the DOE’s attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment here in the United States,” he added.

Lyman was also among the experts who criticized changes that NPR exposed last week, after senior editor and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel obtained documents detailing updates to “departmental orders, which dictate requirements for almost every aspect of the reactors’ operations—including safety systems, environmental protections, site security, and accident investigations.”

While the DOE said that it shared early versions of the rules with companies, “the reduction of unnecessary regulations will increase innovation in the industry without jeopardizing safety,” and “the department anticipates publicly posting the directives later this year,” Brumfiel noted that the orders he saw weren’t labeled as drafts and had the word “approved” on their cover pages.

In a lengthy statement about last week’s reporting, Lyman said on the Union of Concerned Scientists website that “this deeply troubling development confirms my worst fears about the dire state of nuclear power safety and security oversight under the Trump administration. Such a brazen rewriting of hundreds of crucial safeguards for the public underscores why preservation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as an independent, transparent nuclear regulator is so critical.”

“The Energy Department has not only taken a sledgehammer to the basic principles that underlie effective nuclear regulation, but it has also done so in the shadows, keeping the public in the dark,” he continued. “These long-standing principles were developed over the course of many decades and consider lessons learned from painful events such as the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. This is a massive experiment in the deregulation of novel, untested nuclear facilities that could pose grave threats to public health and safety.”

“These drastic changes may extend beyond the Reactor Pilot Program, which was created by President Trump last year to circumvent the more rigorous licensing rules employed by the NRC,” Lyman warned. “While the DOE created a legally dubious framework to designate these reactors as ‘test’ reactors to bypass the NRC’s statutory authority, these dramatic alterations may further weaken standards used in the broader DOE authorization process and propagate across the entire fleet of commercial nuclear facilities, severely degrading nuclear safety throughout the United States.”

MOSCOW BLOG: Nuclear arms race is already underway

The last of the Cold War-era missile security deals has expired opening the way for a new arms race, but actually a new race is already well underway. / bne IntelliNews

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By Ben Aris in Berlin February 5, 2026

The New START treaty expired last night. It is the last of the Cold War-era missile agreements and marks the death of what security infrastructure was left to prevent the total annihilation of the planet.

There was a reason this infrastructure was put in place. Without it the natural urge is to get into an arms race. The logic of the security infrastructure is that of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) – i.e. you only need enough missiles to make sure that the other guy will also be completely destroyed if he fires at you first.

Without the infrastructure the temptation is to get a bigger and better missile than the other guy (or just more of them) so that you have an advantage. As both the US and Russia already have over 5,000 missiles each that is already complete overkill in the MAD set up. (China is a relatively new player in this game and has around 600.) You only need 100 missiles to get through the defence to completely collapse a society. And as air defences are not airtight, the military boffins estimate current defences can only stop between 50-70% of inbound missiles. So, we can already blow the world up at least 15-times over.

In other words, slashing the stockpiles will make no practical difference to your ability to destroy the other guy – hence the alphabet soup of missile deals. Why waste all that money and resources on building and maintaining extra missiles if they make no difference to the end result at all? This was the Cold War logic and clearly a very sensible one.

One of the conditions to the New START was to limit stockpiles of missiles to 1,500. If you assume that only 30% of your missiles get through, then that is still 450 missiles – four-times more than you need for MAD to work.

But all this infrastructure has been dismantled now and actually a new arms race is not just a potential problem. A new arms race is already well underway.

This all goes back to 2002 when former President George W Bush unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), the granddaddy of missile deals that was signed in 1972 between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, starting the whole security thing off.

This was an insane and totally unnecessary decision, and the Kremlin freaked out. (I know some people that were involved in the discussion at the time.) This was only a year after Bush met Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and “saw his soul” in his eyes.

Withdrawing from the ABM fundamentally and irreversibly destabilised the international balance of power. It sets off a series of events that leads, in my opinion, directly to the war in Ukraine. It’s one of the reasons that Putin is so obsessed with Nato expansion. After the ABM, one by one all the remaining deals were cancelled or allowed to expire. New START is the last one.

Given the writing has been on the wall for more than two decades, it is no wonder that Russia (and now increasingly China) has been investing heavily into weapons tech.

Those biblical words are doubly poignant today. They appeared on the wall of King Belshazzar’s feast: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” which means: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” Belshazzar was killed the same night.

And having kicked the race off by withdrawing from the ABM, surprisingly the US has been napping ever since. Russian and Chinese missile technology has come on by leaps and bounds since then. Putin showcased new Russian hypersonic missiles during his 2018 state of the nation speech including an ominous video of them flying over the US. More recently Russia released the Oreshnik cruise missile that can hit any city in Europe. The Kinzhal and Zircon, both of which have been used in Ukraine, are too fast to stop (although there are reports of some Kinzhals being brought down by air defence but not the Zircon). The “unstoppable” nuclear powered Poseidon torpedo can circumnavigate the world undetected as it travels so deep. The US doesn’t have anything like this in its arsenal.

It’s the same in critical minerals: there is a very famous Department of Energy report published in 2010 warning that the US had fallen way behind China in the production of critical minerals and rare earth metals (REMs) that China had already, even then, and absolutely nothing was done to address the problem. Ironically, it is one of the (few) things that Trump is doing right, his minerals diplomacy.

The Chinese and Russian are in a race to increase the speeds of their missiles which are already up to a reported Mach 27 (Avangard) in Russia’s case and Mach 25 (DF-41) in China’s case. This is so fast that these missiles can fly from a home base and penetrate the US air defences in under 30mins.

Amazingly, the US doesn’t have any hypersonic missiles at all. It has the “Dark Eagle”, but that is still in development testing and also only has a top speed of Mach 5+. Europe’s hypersonic missiles are still theoretical blueprints.

As our military analyst Patricia Marins recently pointed out the same is true with bells on with the US navy and in naval missiles and Europe is essentially defenceless against a Russian missile attack. Russia has already remilitarised and its entire economy is now on a war footing. China is doing the same thing, and it is knocking out new state of the art high tech weapons every year. China and Russia are developing next-generation combat aircraft. China’s reported J-36 programme appears more advanced than Russia’s Su-57, while the US remains the global leader through its NGAD programme and the troubled F-35 for the moment.

The irony is that despite the US starting this pointless arms race, the Kremlin has made it crystal clear time and time again that it doesn’t want to go there and Putin is desperately keen to restart all these Cold War agreements. He leapt on Biden when the former president offered to renew START in 2021 and the Kremlin immediately offered to open talks on putting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INS Treaty), which Trump nixed in 2019, back in place. Ironically, Biden was also a strong advocate of renewing the Cold War deals and vehemently criticised the decision to nix the ABM treaty, which he warned would be “deeply destabilising” to the international order.

Putin’s desire to renew the missile security infrastructure represents real leverage over the Kremlin in the current peace talks as he would be willing to give up a lot to get these deals done, in my opinion. But the issue has barely been mentioned. In the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement this morning they threatened a new arms race, but even now at this late stage, held the door open for new arms control talks. However, the MFA also said that they had no response from the White House on their offer to negotiate and that “no message is a message in itself.”

This article originally appeared in Editor’s Picks, a free daily email digest of bne IntelliNews’ best stories from the last 24 hours. Sign up for free here.

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START’s Expiration: A Threat to Humanitarian Disarmament

When major powers abandon restraint in the nuclear field, they send a dangerous message: that international commitments are optional, norms are negotiable, and humanitarian principles can be sidelined.


“The World Is No Place For Nuclear Weapons” was projected onto the side of Queen Elizabeth House, the new flagship UK Government Hub, in Edinburgh, to celebrate that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons enters into force as international law on January 22, 2021.
(Photo by Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)


Dr. Ghassan Shahrour
Feb 05, 2026

Common Dreams


In January 2026, I published an article warning that the world was approaching the final hours of the New START Treaty. On February 5, 2026, that warning has become reality. For the first time since the early 1970s, no legally binding limits exist on US-Russian strategic nuclear forces. This moment is not only a failure of arms control; it is a profound threat to human security, humanitarian disarmament, and the credibility of multilateral commitments across all fields.

New START was the last surviving pillar of bilateral nuclear restraint. Its expiration removes the ceilings on deployed strategic warheads and delivery systems, eliminates inspections and data exchanges, and forces both sides to operate in an environment of opacity and worst‑case assumptions. In my earlier article, I argued that this collapse would deepen the crisis of credibility facing the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty (NPT), especially the long‑neglected obligations under Article VI. That analysis stands even more firmly today. A world without New START is a world where the NPT’s disarmament pillar is no longer eroding slowly—it is cracking openly.

But the consequences extend far beyond the nuclear domain. The end of New START is a blow to humanitarian disarmament as a whole. Treaties such as the Mine Ban Treaty (MBT) and the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CMC) were built on the belief that international law can restrain the most harmful weapons and protect civilians. When major powers abandon restraint in the nuclear field, they send a dangerous message: that international commitments are optional, norms are negotiable, and humanitarian principles can be sidelined when politically inconvenient.

This erosion of respect for international commitments is not isolated. It is part of a wider pattern visible in multiple conflicts, where the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, attacks on medical facilities, and disregard for civilian protection have become disturbingly normalized. The collapse of New START reinforces this trend by weakening the broader culture of compliance that humanitarian disarmament depends on.

Strengthening humanitarian disarmament—from nuclear weapons to landmines, cluster munitions, and all weapons that devastate civilian life—is now an urgent moral responsibility.

The humanitarian and medical consequences of this moment cannot be overstated. Nuclear weapons are not abstract strategic tools; they are instruments of mass suffering. Their use—even once—would overwhelm health systems, destroy infrastructure, contaminate environments, and inflict irreversible harm on generations. The expiration of New START increases the likelihood of miscalculation, escalation, and arms racing at a time when global humanitarian systems are already stretched beyond capacity.

This is why the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) has gained renewed relevance. Its humanitarian logic—grounded in the lived experiences of survivors and the realities of medical response—offers a principled alternative to the paralysis of traditional arms control. As nuclear‑armed states retreat from their obligations, the TPNW stands as a reminder that disarmament is not only a legal duty but a moral imperative.

Today’s moment demands more than observation. It requires action.

Governments must restore restraint and rebuild trust in multilateral commitments.

Civil society must raise its voice with renewed urgency.

Humanitarian and medical organizations must continue to highlight the human cost of nuclear policies.

And the media must stop treating nuclear risks as distant or technical; they are immediate threats to human life and dignity.

The expiration of New START is not the end of arms control—but it is a warning. A warning that the international system is drifting toward a world where the most destructive weapons are unconstrained, humanitarian norms are weakened, and global commitments lose their meaning.

Strengthening humanitarian disarmament—from nuclear weapons to landmines, cluster munitions, and all weapons that devastate civilian life—is now an urgent moral responsibility, more than ever.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Dr. Ghassan Shahrour
Dr. Ghassan Shahrour, coordinator of Arab Human Security Network, is a medical doctor, prolific writer, and human rights advocate specializing in health, disability, disarmament, and human security. He has contributed to global campaigns for peace, disarmament, and the rights of persons with disabilities.
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Rubio Confirms End of New START, Sparking Calls for Nuclear Talks With Russia, China

“Trump, Putin, and Xi can and must put the world on a safer path by taking commonsense actions to build down the nuclear danger,” said one campaigner.


US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a press conference at the Sate Department in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2026.
(Photo by Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Feb 04, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday implicitly confirmed that New START—a key arms control treaty between the United States and Russia—will expire Thursday, prompting renewed demands for what one group called “a more coherent approach from the Trump administration” toward nuclear nonproliferation.

Asked about the impending expiration of New START during a Wednesday press conference, Rubio said he didn’t “have any announcement” on the matter, and that President Donald Trump “will opine on it later.”


“Obviously, the president’s been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile,” Rubio said.

New START, signed in 2010, committed the United States and Russia to halving the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers in their arsenals. While the treaty did not limit the size of the countries’ actual nuclear arsenals, proponents pointed to its robust verification regime and other transparency features as mutually beneficial highlights of the agreement.

“We have known that New START would end for 15 years, but no one has shown the necessary leadership to be prepared for its expiration,” said John Erath, senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and former longtime State Department official.

“The treaty limited the number of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia could have, but perhaps more importantly, New START also provided each country with unprecedented insights into the other’s arsenal so that Washington and Moscow could make decisions based on real information rather than speculation,” Erath added.

Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said Wednesday that “the end of New START requires a more coherent approach from the Trump administration.”

“If President Trump and Secretary Rubio are serious, they should make a serious proposal for bilateral (not trilateral) talks with Beijing,” he asserted. “Despite Trump’s talk about involving China in nuclear negotiations, there is no indication that Trump or his team have taken the time to propose risk reduction or arms control talks with China since returning to office in 2025.”

Kimball continued:
Furthermore, there is no reason why the United States and Russia should not and cannot continue, as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin suggested on September 22, to respect the central limits of New START and begin the hard work of negotiating a new framework agreement involving verifiable limits on strategic, intermediate-range, and short-range nuclear weapons, as well as strategic missile defenses.

At the same time, if he is serious about involving China in “denuclearization” talks, he could and should invite [Chinese President Xi Jinping] when they meet later this year, to agree to regular bilateral talks on risk reduction and arms control involving senior Chinese and US officials.

“With the end of New START, Trump, Putin, and Xi can and must put the world on a safer path by taking commonsense actions to build down the nuclear danger,” Kimball added.

Erath lamented that “with New START’s expiration, we have not only lost unprecedented verification measures that our military and decision-makers depended on, but we have ended more than five decades of painstaking diplomacy that successfully avoided nuclear catastrophe.”

“Agreements preceding New START helped reduce the global nuclear arsenal by more than 80% since the height of the Cold War,”
he noted. “Now, both Russia and the United States have no legal obstacle to building their arsenals back up, and we could find ourselves reliving the Cold War.”

Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board advanced its symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to global thermonuclear annihilation, citing developments including failure to extend New START, China’s growing arsenal, and Russian weapons tests—to which Trump has vowed to respond in kind.

“The good news is,” said Erath, is that “the end of New START does not have to mean the end of nuclear arms control.”

“While New START can’t be extended beyond today, Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin could decide to respect the numerical limits the treaty set on nuclear arsenals,” he explained. “They could also resume the treaty’s data exchanges and on-site inspections, in addition to implementing verification measures from other previous arms control treaties.”

“Further, they could instruct their administrations to begin immediate talks on a new treaty to cover existing and novel systems and potentially bring in other nuclear powers, like China,” Erath continued. “Meanwhile, Congress could—and should—fund nonproliferation and global monitoring efforts while refusing to fund dangerous new nuclear weapons systems.”

Last December, US Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.), John Garamendi (D-Calif.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) reintroduced the bicameral Hastening Arms Limitation Talks (HALT) Act, “legislation outlining a vision for a 21st century freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons.”



“The Doomsday Clock is at 85 seconds to midnight,” Markey—who co-chairs the congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group—said Wednesday ahead of a press conference with HALT Act co-sponsors. “We need to replace New START now.”

‘Era of Unconstrained Nuclear Competition’ Looms With US-Russia New START Treaty Expiring

“The United States and Russia already have enough deployed nuclear weapons to kill tens of millions of people in an hour and devastate the world,” said one expert, warning a lapse will “only make the world less safe.”


A woman walks past a wall poster that warns of the impending expiration of New START, a US-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, on January 30, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Feb 03, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

If New START expires on Thursday, it will be the first time in decades that the United States and Russia don’t have a nuclear arms control treaty, and experts have been sounding the alarm about the arms race that likely lies ahead.

“The expiration of New START would be massively destabilizing and potentially very costly both in terms of economics and security,” said Jennifer Knox, a research and policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) Global Security Program, in a Tuesday statement.




‘85 Seconds to Midnight’: Doomsday Clock Ticks Down as Trump Drags World Toward New Low

“The United States and Russia already have enough deployed nuclear weapons to kill tens of millions of people in an hour and devastate the world,” Knox pointed out. “Letting New START lapse would erase decades of hard-won progress and only make the world less safe.”

New START was signed in April 2010, under the Obama administration, and entered into force the following February. A decade later, just days into the Biden administration, it was renewed for five years. In 2022, Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine—an ongoing conflict—and the next year, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his country’s participation in the treaty, though he has not withdrawn.

“The global security environment facing the United States is very different from when New START was first negotiated, but it remains true that bounding an open-ended, costly arms race will still require some form of agreement between Washington and Moscow,” said Ankit Panda, the Stanton senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program, in a statement.

“The public and lawmakers alike must recognize that we are on the cusp of a fundamentally new nuclear age—one that is more unpredictable, complex, and dangerous than anything we’ve witnessed post-Cold War,” warned Panda, one of the experts participating in a Wednesday briefing about the treaty. “A big risk is that without any quantitative limits or hands-on verification, we’ll end up with compounding worst-case-scenario thinking in both capitals, as during the Cold War.”

While Putin has halted US inspections of Russian nuclear facilities, he has still proposed extending the treaty for a year. Tara Drozdenko, director of the UCS Global Security Program, said that “abiding by New START for another year would be a win-win-win for the United States, Russia, and the rest of the world... The Trump administration should take swift action to publicly acknowledge that the United States will continue to abide by New START in the interim.”



However, US President Donald Trump—who fancies himself as a deal-maker—hasn’t expressed an interest in fighting for the pact, telling the New York Times last month that “if it expires, it expires,” and “I’d rather do a new agreement that’s much better.”

Trump has called for China—which has the most nuclear weapons after Russia and the United States, and is building up its arsenal—to be part of a new deal, but Beijing hasn’t signaled it will do so. Putin has proposed participation from France and the United Kingdom. The other nuclear-armed nations are India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan.

Noting Trump’s comments to the Times and aspiration for the Chinese government to join, Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities, declared that “this is wishful thinking–if the administration thinks getting a new ‘better’ treaty after this one lapses will be easy, they are mistaken.”

“New START’s end brings few benefits and lots of risks to the United States, especially as Washington tries to stabilize relations with rivals like Russia and China,” she said, suggesting that Trump “would be better off hanging on to the agreement he has a little longer before trying to get a better one.”

Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin ally who signed the treaty while serving as president and is now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said in a Monday interview with Reuters, TASS, and the WarGonzo project that “our proposal remains on the table, the treaty has not yet expired, and if the Americans want to extend it, that can be done.”

“For almost 60 years, we haven’t had a situation where strategic nuclear potentials weren’t limited in some way. Now such a situation is possible,” he noted. “I spent almost my entire life, starting from 1972, under the umbrella of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.”

“In some ways, even with all the costs, it is still an element of trust,” Medvedev said. “When such a treaty exists, there is trust. When it doesn’t, that trust is exhausted. The fact that we are now in this situation is clear evidence of a crisis in international relations. This is absolutely obvious.”

Considering New START’s potential expiration this week, the Russian leader said that “I don’t want to say that this immediately means a catastrophe and a nuclear war, but it should still alert everyone. The clock that is ticking will, in this case, undoubtedly accelerate again.”

According to Reuters, he was referencing the Doomsday Clock. Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board set the symbolic clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe, citing various developments, including a failure to extend the treaty, Russian weapons tests, and China’s growing arsenal.

“In 2025, it was almost impossible to identify a nuclear issue that got better,” Jon B. Wolfsthal, a board member and director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), said last week. “More states are relying more intently on nuclear weapons, multiple states are openly talking about using nuclear weapons for not only deterrence but for coercion. Hundreds of billions are being spent to modernize and expand nuclear arsenals all over the world, and more and more non-nuclear states are considering whether they should acquire their own nuclear weapons or are hedging their nuclear bets.”

“Instead of stoking the fires of the nuclear arms competition, nuclear states are reducing their own security and putting the entire planet at risk. Leaders of all states must relearn the lessons of the Cold War—no one wins a nuclear arms race, and the only way to reduce nuclear dangers is through binding agreement to limit the size and shape of their nuclear arsenals,” he argued. “Nuclear states and their partners need to invest now in proven crisis communication and risk reduction tools, recommit to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, refrain from nuclear threats, and pursue a more predictable and stable global security system.”

Regarding New START specifically, FAS Nuclear Information Project associate director Matt Korda stressed this week that “we are about to enter an era of unconstrained nuclear competition without any guardrails. Not only will there no longer be anything stopping the nuclear superpowers from nearly doubling their deployed nuclear arsenals, but they would now be doing so in an environment of mutual distrust, opacity, and worst-case thinking.”

“While New START was a bilateral agreement between Russia and the United States, its expiration will have far-reaching consequences for the world,” he said. “There are no benefits from a costly arms buildup that brings us right back to where we started, but there would be real advantages in pursuing transparency and predictability in an otherwise unpredictable world.”

Who Has Nearly 90% Of The World's Nuclear Weapons?

IT'S A DUOPOLY

Jonathan H. Kantor
Tue, February 3, 2026 

SLASHGEAR


A mushroom cloud from a hydrogen bomb test - Alones/Shutterstock


Several military technological innovations have changed the course of history. From the sailing ship to the stirrup, these advances have pushed the world into new directions, and chief among them is nuclear weapons. The first nukes were some of the most notorious weapons developed during World War II, used in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. After the war, nuclear weapons became the tentpole of military and foreign policy, and other nations have followed the U.S. in developing their own arsenals.

As of writing, there are nine countries with nuclear weapons: Russia, China, the United Kingdom, India, North Korea, France, Pakistan, Israel, and the U.S. It should be noted that Israel has never confirmed whether it has nuclear weapons, despite most international agencies believing that it does. Additionally, Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Regardless, there are numerous nations with weapons of all kinds, and together, these account for more than 12,300 warheads, 9,600 of which remain in active military stockpiles.

While that's a lot of nukes, just two countries collectively hold 86.8% of the world's nuclear weapons, with the remaining split between the other seven. Those two nations are the U.S. and Russia, the latter of which has more than the former. These stockpiles represent the legacy of the U.S. policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, which ensured that both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union maintained enough firepower to wipe out the other should either deploy a nuclear weapon in combat.

America's nuclear weapons stockpile

Three nuclear missiles launched over a backdrop of the American Flag. - Dancingman/Getty Images

While the Cold War ended decades ago, the United States still maintains a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. This is in line with the U.S.' nuclear triad, which is a policy requiring three nuclear deployment methods at all times: submarine-launched ballistic missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and aircraft-dropped nuclear weapons. While the stockpile has decreased significantly since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. maintains 5,177 warheads, according to the Federation of Atomic Scientists' 2025 Status of the World's Nuclear Forces report.

The weapons are broken down into three categories. Deployed warheads are those on ballistic missiles and those at bomber bases, and the U.S. has 1,670 of these. It has 1,930 stockpiled warheads, which are available for use when needed. Finally, there are the retired nuclear warheads, accounting for 1,477 of America's total. These are weapons that aren't intended for use, but have yet to be dismantled. This leaves the U.S. with a total of 3,700 usable nuclear warheads.

The U.S. continues to develop nuclear weapons technology, though testing is heavily restricted via numerous treaties. Several defense contractors and government agencies manufacture the nation's nuclear missiles and their warheads, with modernization efforts carried out at multiple facilities in Texas and Tennessee. These ensure that the nation's nuclear capabilities are spread out and maintained in a constant state of readiness should the need arise.

Russia's nuclear arsenal

Missiles preparing to fire over a backdrop of a nuclear detonation, the Russian flag, and a nuclear symbol - Bymuratdeniz/Getty Images

When it comes to nuclear warheads, Russia and the former Soviet Union reign supreme. The Soviet Union developed and tested the largest nuclear weapon ever tested, the Tsar Bomba, which detonated at an estimated 50 megatons. Of course, that's only one of many, and when the U.S.S.R. collapsed, its constituent nations retained some weapons. Ukraine briefly held the third-largest stockpile before denuclearization, and other nations followed suit. These days, Russia has a stockpile of 5,459 total warheads, according to the FAS' 2025 report.

Russia's weapons break down to 1,780 deployed warheads, 2,591 stockpiled, and 1,150 retired, leaving a usable total of 4,309. As a result, Russia maintains 609 nuclear warheads more than the United States, but the difference means little when you're talking about weapons capable of total annihilation of the world in a nuclear war. Like the U.S., Russia maintains its weapons for use in numerous ways, as the nation has nuclear-armed submarines, strategic nuclear bombers, and ICBMs ready to go should the unfortunate need arise.

While Russia and the United States have a lot of nukes, accounting for almost 90% of the total world stockpile, they're nowhere near the numbers of the past: There were an estimated 70,374 nuclear warheads worldwide in 1986. It took a long time to dismantle and draw down from that amount, and treaties continue to push nations to reduce their total number of deployable weapons. Unfortunately, neither the U.S. nor Russia is a signatory to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Agriculture Experts Warn of ‘Widespread Collapse’ in US Farms Thanks to Trump Policies

“These disruptions are... financially squeezing food and agriculture businesses and sowing the seeds of division in rural communities.”


Glenn Morris, 83, harvests corn on October 11, 2021 in Princeton, Indiana.
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Feb 04, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


A large group of agriculture experts warned that US farms are taking a financial beating thanks to President Donald Trump’s global trade war.

In a letter sent to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees on Tuesday, the experts warned of a potential “widespread collapse of American agriculture and our rural communities” caused in no small part by Trump administration policies.

The letter’s signatories—which include former leaders of American agricultural commodity and biofuels associations, farm leaders, and former USDA officials—pointed to Trump’s tariffs on imported goods and his mass deportation policies as particularly harmful.

“It is clear that the current administration’s actions, along with congressional inaction,” the letter states, “have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical [agricultural] research and staffing.”

The letter goes on to describe Trump’s tariffs as “indiscriminate and haphazard,” noting they “have not revitalized American manufacturing and have significantly damaged American farm economy.”

The tariffs have also hurt farmers’ access to overseas markets, the letter continues, as foreign nations have reacted with retaliatory tariffs.

“Consider the impact of the China trade war on soybeans alone,” the letter says. “In 2018, when the China tariffs were initially imposed, whole US soybean exports represented 47% of the world market. Today, whole US soybeans represent just 24.4%—a 50% reduction in market share. Meanwhile, Brazil’s share of the world export market grew by more than 20%.”

When it comes to the administration’s immigration policies, the letter says that “mass deportations, removal of protected status, and failure to reform the H-2A visa program is wreaking havoc with dairy, fruit and produce, and meat processing.”

“Those disruptions are causing food to go to waste and driving up food costs for consumers,” the letter adds. “These disruptions are also financially squeezing food and agriculture businesses and sowing the seeds of division in rural communities. Farmers need these workers.”

The letter offers several policy proposals that the administration and Congress could take to help US farmers, including ending tariffs on farm inputs, repealing tariffs that have blocked access to overseas markets, passing reform to the H-2A visa program to help ensure farmers have sufficient workers, and extending trade agreements with Mexico and Canada for the next 16 years.

The letter also urges Congress to “convene meetings with farmers to discuss challenges that they are facing gather input on additional policy solutions and build momentum to address the farm crisis.”

One of the letter’s signatories, former National Corn Growers Association chief executive Jon Doggett, told the New York Times on Tuesday that he felt he had to speak out because “we’re not having those conversations” about the struggles facing US farmers “in an open and meaningful way.”

The agriculture experts who signed the letter aren’t alone in their concerns about US farmers’ financial condition, as Reuters reported that US Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said during a Tuesday conference call that he was aware that US farmers are “losing money, lots of money.”