Tom Nichols: The End of the Nuclear-Arms-Control Era

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trump-nuclear-weapons-treaty/685856/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/3bwDv

Something very dangerous is on track to happen this Thursday.

In two days, New START, the last significant survivor of the age of nuclear-arms-control agreements that began in the 1960s, will come to an end. Donald Trump—a president who claims to be very concerned about “nuclear,” his odd, one-word appellation for all things relating to nuclear weapons—has decided to let the treaty lapse. In July, Trump said that New START was “not an agreement you want expiring,” but last month he backtracked: “If it expires, it expires.”

The New START agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, in force since 2011, puts caps on the number of American and Russian “strategic” weapons, the long-range missiles and bombers that can cover the thousands of miles between North America and Eurasia. It is the last in a line of treaties that helped stabilize the relationship between the superpowers during the the tense years of the Cold War, and then provided the framework for serious reductions in nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. On Thursday, the two largest nuclear powers will be free to begin a new arms race, a needless competition that both nations have managed to avert for decades.

Indeed, even the Russians think the treaty should be renewed. Moscow suspended its participation in the treaty’s ongoing processes (such as information exchanges) back in 2023 as part of the diplomatic sparring with the U.S. over Ukraine, but the Russians have nonetheless offered to abide by the treaty’s numerical limits for one more year. The Trump administration has shown little interest in even this much. As the nuclear-arms researcher Pavel Podvig noted last week, “the US expert and political community has essentially reached consensus on the need to expand the US strategic arsenal.”

Podvig isn’t exactly right here: The U.S. nuclear establishment—the web of think tanks, contractors, and industries that make and support nuclear weapons—almost always favors the creation of more and newer weapons. (I worked for one such contractor decades ago.) Plenty of other experts and political leaders, of course, would contend that building more nuclear weapons is a very bad idea, but they’re not advising this White House. As in his first term, Trump is surrounded by people who oppose most treaties, regarding them as little more than annoying limitations on American power, and who view arms-control agreements as a sign of weakness. The secretary of the Navy even wants to put nuclear weapons on Trump’s proposed new battleships, a dangerous Cold War policy that was abandoned by George H. W. Bush more than 30 years ago.

*snip*