The New START treaty expires in three days.
When it does, for the first time in over half a century, no binding agreement will limit the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia.
No caps on warheads. No limits on delivery systems. No inspections. No verification.
The last time this happened, Richard Nixon was president and the Soviet Union still existed.
The arms control establishment is terrified. Trump is calm.
“If it expires, it expires,” he told the New York Times. “We’ll just do a better agreement.”
That’s either the most reckless statement a president has made about nuclear weapons or the most strategically honest one in decades.
What New START Actually Does
The treaty, signed in 2010, caps each side at 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 delivery systems — intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and heavy bombers.
It includes verification measures: inspections, data exchanges, notifications. The kind of trust-but-verify framework that arms control advocates consider essential.
Without it, both countries are free to deploy as many nuclear weapons as they can build.
Analysts estimate the U.S. could nearly double its deployed warheads. Russia could add hundreds within a year.
Those aren’t theoretical numbers. The weapons exist. They’re in storage. They just need to be moved to operational status.
Russia Already Walked Away
Here’s what the arms control crowd conveniently omits when they blame Trump.
Russia suspended participation in New START in 2023. Putin pulled out of compliance amid tensions over Ukraine.
The treaty was already dead in practice. Russia stopped allowing inspections. Stopped sharing data. Stopped honoring the transparency provisions that made the agreement meaningful.
Trump isn’t killing a functioning treaty. He’s declining to perform CPR on a corpse.
Senator Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, stated it plainly: “The New START Treaty was negotiated in a bygone era, 15 years ago. Until Vladimir Putin decided that compliance with Russia’s obligations were no longer in his interest.”
You can’t have an arms control agreement with a country that doesn’t comply. Pretending otherwise is diplomacy as theater.
Putin’s One-Year Offer Sounds Reasonable Until You Think About It
Putin proposed a temporary measure: both sides voluntarily maintain existing limits for one year while negotiations continue.
It sounds reasonable. It’s not.
“Voluntarily maintain” means no enforcement mechanism. No inspections. No verification. Russia promises to behave, we promise to believe them, and both sides proceed on the honor system.
With Vladimir Putin.
The man who invaded Ukraine after promising he wouldn’t. Who poisoned opponents with nerve agents. Who shot down a civilian airliner and lied about it for years.
A voluntary agreement with Putin is worth exactly as much as his word — which is worth nothing.
The China Problem That Changes Everything
Trump’s position is strategically clear: any new nuclear treaty must include China.
A bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia made sense during the Cold War, when those were the only two nuclear superpowers that mattered.
That world is gone.
China has an estimated 600 nuclear warheads today. The Pentagon estimates they’ll have over 1,000 by 2030. They’re building new missile silos, deploying new submarines, and developing hypersonic delivery systems.
A bipartisan Congressional commission warned in 2023: “Our nation will soon encounter a fundamentally different global setting than it has ever experienced: we will face a world where two nations possess nuclear arsenals on par with our own.”
Two nuclear peers. Not one. Two.
Any arms treaty that limits only the U.S. and Russia while China builds freely isn’t arms control. It’s unilateral disarmament with extra steps.
China Refuses to Negotiate Because the Current Situation Benefits Them
Beijing’s response to Trump’s demand for trilateral talks has been flat refusal.
“China’s nuclear strength is by no means on the same level with that of the U.S.,” their Foreign Ministry said. “It’s neither reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join.”
This is brilliant strategic positioning by Beijing. They refuse to negotiate while their arsenal is smaller, build as fast as possible, and plan to negotiate — if ever — only after achieving parity.
Every year without a trilateral agreement is a year China closes the gap. By 2030, the “we’re too small to negotiate” excuse evaporates. But by then, they’ll have 1,000 warheads and a completely different set of demands.
Trump understands this. That’s why he wants China at the table now, while leverage still exists.
The Arms Race Nobody Can Afford
Let’s be honest about the costs.
Nuclear weapons are extraordinarily expensive to build, maintain, deploy, and secure. The U.S. is already spending hundreds of billions modernizing its existing arsenal.
An unconstrained arms race means even more spending — at a time when the national debt is already $36 trillion and interest payments alone consume a significant portion of the federal budget.
Russia can afford it even less. Their economy is smaller than Italy’s. Every ruble spent on warheads is a ruble not spent on an economy already strained by sanctions and war.
China has the deepest pockets of the three but faces its own economic challenges — a property crisis, demographic decline, and slowing growth.
Nobody wants an arms race. But nobody wants to be the one who stops building while the others continue.
That’s the trap Trump is trying to break.
Trump Restarted Nuclear Testing for a Reason
In October, Trump ordered the Department of War to restart nuclear weapons testing for the first time in over three decades.
The move was widely condemned by arms control advocates. But it served a strategic purpose.
China and Russia are both believed to be conducting low-yield nuclear tests or at least preparing facilities for testing. The U.S. has maintained a voluntary moratorium since 1992.
Restarting testing signals that America is prepared to compete. It’s leverage — the same kind of leverage Reagan used when he launched the Strategic Defense Initiative. The message to Moscow and Beijing: we will match whatever you build, and we have the resources to outbuild you.
Reagan’s SDI helped end the Cold War because the Soviets realized they couldn’t keep up. Trump’s testing restart sends the same message to two adversaries simultaneously.
The Gamble That Might Work
Trump is betting that letting New START expire creates pressure on all three parties to negotiate something better.
Russia needs limits because an unconstrained arms race with the American economy is a race they lose. They lost the last one. They’ll lose this one too.
China needs limits because being drawn into a three-way arms race while managing economic problems is strategically disastrous.
And America needs limits because even superpowers have finite resources and infinite nuclear weapons help no one.
The expiration creates urgency. The testing restart creates credibility. The demand for China’s inclusion creates the framework for a deal that actually reflects the modern world.
It’s a gamble. It’s uncomfortable. Arms control experts will write panicked op-eds for months.
But a trilateral agreement that constrains all three nuclear powers would be worth more than a dozen bilateral treaties that China ignores while building toward parity.
Fifty Years of Arms Control Built on a World That No Longer Exists
The arms control framework was designed for a bipolar world. Two superpowers. Two arsenals. One treaty.
That world ended when China decided to become a nuclear peer.
Clinging to bilateral agreements while a third power builds unconstrained isn’t stability. It’s denial.
Trump is the first president willing to accept the uncomfortable reality: the old framework is obsolete. The new framework must include China. And getting there requires letting the old one die.
“If it expires, it expires. We’ll just do a better agreement.”
The arms control establishment calls that reckless.
History may call it the moment someone finally acknowledged the world as it actually is — and forced the hardest negotiation in nuclear history.
Thursday, the clock runs out. What comes next will shape the century.
