The End of New START: A World Without Nuclear Arms Control
By Sanna the Weaver • Wed Mar 18 2026 • Geopolitics
For the first time since the Nixon administration, the United States and Russia are operating without any legally binding treaty limiting their nuclear arsenals. New START — the last major nuclear arms control agreement — expired in February 2026 without a successor. The two nations that together hold 87% of the world's nuclear weapons now face each other with no inspection rights, no transparency requirements, and no mutually agreed ceilings on warhead numbers. How We Got Here New START's demise was not sudden. Russia suspended its participation in February 2023, citing US support for Ukraine. Extension talks stalled repeatedly. The Biden administration made several attempts at dialogue that went nowhere. When the treaty lapsed, neither the Trump administration nor the Kremlin expressed significant public regret — a silence that arms control experts find deeply alarming. The architecture of nuclear arms control built over fifty years — from SALT I through INF to New START — was designed not merely to limit warheads but to create transparency mechanisms, build mutual understanding, and reduce the risk of accidental escalation through miscalculation. All of that is now gone. The China Variable Perhaps more significant than the US-Russia breakdown is China's nuclear buildup. The Pentagon estimates China is on track to deploy 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, up from approximately 400 today. Beijing has never participated in bilateral arms control with Washington and has consistently refused to join any multilateral nuclear talks unless the US and Russia first achieve much deeper cuts. Any additional deployments by the US or Russia — and both are now free to make them — could accelerate China's own buildup, creating a three-way arms race with no historical precedent. "We are sleepwalking into a world of unconstrained nuclear competition. The mechanisms that prevented catastrophe during the Cold War no longer exist." — Former US arms control negotiator, March 2026 New Dangers The collapse of arms control coincides with the development of hypersonic glide vehicles — which both the US, Russia, and China are deploying — that travel at more than five times the speed of sound and maneuver unpredictably, potentially defeating existing early warning systems. The combination of faster delivery systems, no treaty limits, and degraded communication channels between nuclear powers creates conditions that arms strategists describe as "the most dangerous nuclear environment since the Cuban Missile Crisis." Unlike 1962, there is no direct US-Soviet hotline equivalent linking Washington to Beijing.