

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.


Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
“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."
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.
"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the next year, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his country's participation in the treaty, though he has not withdrawn.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."
Without New START, there will be no legal limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals, triggering a costly and dangerous arms race.
On 5 February 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START—the last remaining arms-control pact between the United States and Russia—is set to expire. Moscow offered to Washington to voluntarily extend it for a year, but US President Donald Trump recently shrugged it off and told the New York Times, "If it expires, it expires.” POTUS has also recently been in the headlines for saying that he doesn’t believe he is required to follow any laws except his own morality, accountable to no one.
I often think about the pre-election live-streamed conversation between Trump and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX is now in charge of orbital dominance for the US Space Force over planet Earth. When Trump expressed fear of nuclear disasters like Fukushima, Musk responded by defending nuclear energy, despite the fact that a country that has the ability to create and maintain nuclear-power facilities is technically capable of creating nuclear weapons, and despite the fact that we still do not have the technology to remediate (detoxify) nuclear waste.
Musk went even further, minimizing the danger of nuclear weapons themselves. During the conversation which took place on August 11, 2025 (just three days after the 80th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Nagasaki), at an hour and 17 minutes Musk said: “It’s like, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re like full cities again. So it’s really not something that, you know, it’s not as scary as people think, basically. But let’s see.”
No. We do not ever want to see nuclear weapons used again. The basis of any valid moral system means doing everything you can to minimize the harm you cause to others, and making amends for the harm you do cause. Nuclear weapons are designed to destroy entire cities.
A new arms race would not make anyone safer—but it would make weapons manufacturers wealthier.
Those who survive the initial blast endure slow, excruciating deaths from radiation sickness, burns, cancers, and generational genetic damage—as did so many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is nothing “not as scary as people think” about this.
Recently, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at SpaceX announced that Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence software GROK, from Musk’s private corporation xAI, will be integrated into Pentagon networks. Hegseth said:
I demand and we demand that we arm our war fighters with overwhelming and lethal technology right now… This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed, to ensure that we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future. In short, we will win this race.
The only race being fueled in the planet’s current polycrisis is the race to extinction, where there are only losers. The current push by the Department of War to accelerate AI-driven warfare alongside the development of new nuclear weapons eerily echoes the War Room scenes in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, where General “Buck” Turgidson treats mass murder and nuclear holocaust as a logistics problem and a branding opportunity. Reality is stranger than fiction when today’s enthusiasm for automation, speed, and “dominance” mimics satire like in Kubrick’s dark comedy. When machines shorten decision time and leaders prioritize advantage over restraint, the system begins to outrun moral judgment.
It was only a few presidencies ago in 1985 when the USA under former President Ronald Reagan reached a joint agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The dialogue implied that neither side would seek military superiority, with the intention to lower the risk of catastrophic conflict and to advance arms-control negotiations.
From survivors of nuclear tests on American soil—like New Mexico, Nevada, and San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point Shipyard—to communities across the Pacific, from the Marshall Islands to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are innocent victims who experienced the horror of nuclear weapons. Their testimonies exist. Their pain is documented. Their warnings are clear.
As Mrs. Yoko Ota, a Japanese writer who put down this description shortly after the Bomb destroyed Hiroshima, recalled:
On the roads I saw thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children fleeing the hell of Hiroshima. All of them, without exception, were covered with terrible wounds. Their eyebrows were completely burned off. On their faces and hands the skin was burned too and hung in strips. If many of them held their two arms stretched toward the sky, it was purely to try and calm the pain. These unfortunate creatures had their whole bodies swollen up, like drowned men who have been a long time in the water. Their eyelids were swollen so that their eyes were completely shut, while the skin all around was bright red. They were all blind… Most of them were naked to the waist… girls completely naked, women without a hair on their heads, an old woman with both arms dislocated, walking along with them hanging by her sides, the flesh, burnt as if on a grill, came away from the bones; blood was flowing abundantly and a yellow liquid like fat mingled with it…There wasn’t a single person who wasn’t wounded. A woman was lying on the ground, her head split open horizontally. The whole inside of her head was red, like a watermelon. In spite of this horrible wound the woman was still alive and crawled along the ground, leaving behind her a long red streak…
Survivors of nuclear weapons deserve to be listened to—not dismissed, not minimized, and not disregarded.
Nuclear weapons should never have been created, yet we live with their existence. If the New START treaty lapses, there will be no legally binding limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. A new arms race would not make anyone safer—but it would make weapons manufacturers wealthier. According to The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), “The private sector earned at least $42.5 billion from their nuclear weapons contracts in 2024 alone.”
Companies positioned to profit include defense contractors and tech-military hybrids, many of which already benefit from massive government contracts. Elon Musk’s companies, particularly SpaceX, stand to gain further through expanded “orbital infrastructure” and defense systems. Trump’s proposal for an impossible “Golden Dome” missile defense system would funnel billions more into contractors like SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman—all while creating the illusion of safety rather than actual security—and leaving the working class impoverished and degraded. “Food, not bombs,” has been a persistent slogan among people who demonstrate for peace.
Letting New START expire would end more than a treaty—it would end the last remaining restraint on nuclear escalation. Secretary of War Hegseth announced that the US military will “learn from failure” as a strategy—so wouldn’t it be efficient strategy to learn from the failures of dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and take the opportunity now to renew New START?
Contact your senators in writing or call your representatives at the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121, and urge them to support extending the New START Treaty before it expires on February 5, 2026. Without it, there will be no legal limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals, triggering a costly and dangerous arms race. We need immediate diplomacy to preserve New START, as nuclear arms control is a present and urgent challenge.
When a key treaty expires on February 5, Russian and American leaders will face no barriers whatsoever to the expansion of their nuclear arsenals or to any other steps that might increase the danger of a thermonuclear conflagration.
For most of us, Friday, February 6, 2026, is likely to feel no different than Thursday, February 5. It will be a work or school day for many of us. It might involve shopping for the weekend or an evening get-together with friends, or any of the other mundane tasks of life. But from a world-historical perspective, that day will represent a dramatic turning point, with far-reaching and potentially catastrophic consequences. For the first time in 54 years, the world’s two major nuclear-weapons powers, Russia and the United States, will not be bound by any arms-control treaties and so will be legally free to cram their nuclear arsenals with as many new warheads as they wish—a step both sides appear poised to take.
It’s hard to imagine today, but 50 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the US and Russia (then the Soviet Union) jointly possessed 47,000 nuclear warheads—enough to exterminate all life on Earth many times over. But as public fears of nuclear annihilation increased, especially after the near-death experience of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the leaders of those two countries negotiated a series of binding agreements intended to downsize their arsenals and reduce the risk of Armageddon.
The initial round of those negotiations, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I, began in November 1969 and culminated in the first-ever nuclear arms-limitation agreement, SALT-I, in May 1972. That would then be followed in June 1979 by SALT-II (signed by both parties, though never ratified by the US Senate) and two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I and START II), in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Each of those treaties reduced the number of deployed nuclear warheads on US and Soviet-Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.
In a drive to reduce those numbers even further, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in April 2010, an agreement limiting the number of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550 on each side—still enough to exterminate all life on Earth, but a far cry from the START I limit of 6,000 warheads per side. Originally set to expire on February 5, 2021, New START was extended for another five years (as allowed by the treaty), resetting that expiration date for February 5, 2026, now fast approaching. And this time around, neither party has demonstrated the slightest inclination to negotiate a new extension.
After the expiration of the New START agreement, neither Russia nor the United States will be obliged to limit the numbers of nuclear warheads on their strategic delivery systems, possibly triggering a new global nuclear arms race with no boundaries in sight and an ever-increasing risk of precipitous nuclear escalation.
So, the question is: What, exactly, will it mean for New START to expire for good on February 5?
Most of us haven’t given that a lot of thought in recent decades, because nuclear arsenals have, for the most part, been shrinking and the (apparent) threat of a nuclear war among the great powers seemed to diminish substantially. We have largely escaped the nightmarish experience—so familiar to veterans of the Cold War era—of fearing that the latest crisis, whatever it might be, could result in our being exterminated in a thermonuclear holocaust.
A critical reason for our current freedom from such fears is the fact that the world’s nuclear arsenals had been substantially diminished and that the two major nuclear powers had agreed to legally binding measures, including mutual inspections of their arsenals, meant to reduce the danger of unintended or accidental nuclear war. Together, those measures were crafted to ensure that each side would retain an invulnerable, second-strike nuclear retaliatory force, eliminating any incentive to initiate a nuclear first strike.
Unfortunately, those relatively carefree days will come to an end at midnight on February 5.
Beginning on February 6, Russian and American leaders will face no barriers whatsoever to the expansion of those arsenals or to any other steps that might increase the danger of a thermonuclear conflagration. And from the look of things, both intend to seize that opportunity and increase the likelihood of Armageddon. Worse yet, China’s leaders, pointing to a lack of restraint in Washington and Moscow, are now building up their own nuclear arsenal, only adding further fuel to the urge of American and Russian leaders to blow well past the (soon-to-be-abandoned) New START limits.
Even while adhering to those New START limits of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, both Russia and the United States had taken elaborate and costly steps to enhance the destructive power of their arsenals by replacing older, less-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and nuclear bombers with newer, even more capable ones. As a result, each side was already becoming better equipped to potentially inflict catastrophic damage on its opponent’s nuclear retaliatory forces, making a first strike less inconceivable and so increasing the risk of precipitous escalation in a crisis.
The Russian Federation inherited a vast nuclear arsenal from the former Soviet Union, but many of those systems had already become obsolete or unreliable. To ensure that it maintained an arsenal at least as potent as Washington’s, Moscow sought to replace all of the Soviet-era weapons in its inventory with more modern and capable systems, a process still underway. Russia’s older SS-18 ICBMs, for example, are being replaced by the faster, more powerful SS-29 Sarmat, while its remaining five Delta-IV class missile-carrying submarines (SSBNs) are being replaced by the more modern Borei class. And newer ICBMs, SLBMs, and SSBNs are said to be in development.
At present, Russia possesses 333 ICBMs, approximately half of them deployed in silos and the other half on road-mobile carriers. It also has 192 SLBMs on 12 missile-carrying submarines and possesses 67 strategic bombers, each capable of firing multiple nuclear-armed missiles. Supposedly, those systems are currently loaded with no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads (enough, of course, to destroy several planets), as mandated by the New START treaty. However, many of Russia’s land- and sea-based ballistic missiles are MIRVed (meaning they’re capable of launching multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) but not fully loaded, and so could carry additional warheads if a decision were ever made to do so. Given that Russia possesses as many as 2,600 nuclear warheads in storage, it could rapidly increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons at its disposal beginning on February 6, 2026.
That Russia is keen to enhance the destructive capabilities of its strategic arsenal is evident from Moscow’s drive to augment its existing nuclear weapons by developing new, longer-range ones. Those include the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered, intercontinental-range, giant nuclear torpedo to be carried by a new class of submarines, the Belgorod, meant to hold up to six of them. Reportedly, the Poseidon is designed to detonate off the coasts of American cities, rendering them uninhabitable. Following a round of tests now underway, it is scheduled to be deployed by the Russian Navy in 2027. Another new weapon, the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, is being installed on some of Russia’s existing SS-19 ICBMs. After being boosted into space by the SS-19, the Avangard should be able to travel another 2,000 miles by skimming along the atmosphere’s outer surface while evading most missile-tracking radars.
The United States is engaged in a comparable drive to modernize its arsenal, replacing older weapons with more modern systems. Like Russia, the US maintains a “triad” of nuclear delivery systems—land-based ICBMs, submarine-launched SLBMs, and long-range bombers, each of which is now being upgraded with new warheads at an estimated cost over the next quarter century of approximately $1.5 trillion.
The existing New START-limited US nuclear triad consists of 400 silo-based Minuteman-III ICBMs, 240 Trident-II SLBMs carried by 14 Ohio-class submarines (two of which are assumedly being overhauled at any time), and 96 strategic bombers (20 B-2s and 76 B-52s) armed with a variety of gravity bombs and air-launched cruise missiles. According to current plans, the Minuteman-IIIs will be replaced by Sentinel ICBMs, the Ohio-class SSBNs by Columbia-class ones, and the B-2s and B-52s by the new B-21 Raider bomber. Each of those new systems incorporates important features—greater accuracy, increased stealth, enhanced electronics—that make them even more useful as first-strike weapons, were a decision ever made to use them in such a fashion.
When initiated, the US nuclear modernization project was expected to abide by the New START limit of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. After February 5, however, the US will be under no legal obligation to do so. It could quickly begin efforts to exceed that limit by loading all existing Minuteman-IIIs and future Sentinel missiles on MIRVed rather than single-warhead projectiles and loading the Trident missiles (already MIRVed) with a larger number of warheads, as well as by increasing production of new B-21s. The United States has also commenced development of a new delivery system, the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N), supposedly intended for use in a “limited” regional nuclear conflict in Europe or Asia (though how such a conflagration could be prevented from igniting a global holocaust has never been explained).
In short, after the expiration of the New START agreement, neither Russia nor the United States will be obliged to limit the numbers of nuclear warheads on their strategic delivery systems, possibly triggering a new global nuclear arms race with no boundaries in sight and an ever-increasing risk of precipitous nuclear escalation. Whether they choose to do so will depend on the political environment in both countries and their bilateral relations, as well as elite perceptions of China’s nuclear buildup in both Washington and Moscow.
Both the United States and Russia have already committed vast sums to the “modernization” of their nuclear delivery systems, a process that won’t be completed for years. At present, there is a reasonably broad consensus in both Washington and Moscow on the need to do so. However, any attempt to increase the speed of that process or add new nuclear capabilities will generate immense costs along with significant supply-chain challenges (at a time when both countries are also trying to ramp up their production of conventional, non-nuclear arms), creating fresh political disputes and potential fissures.
Rather than confront such challenges, the leaders of both countries may instead choose to retain the New START limits voluntarily. Indeed, Vladimir Putin has already agreed to a one-year extension of this sort, if the United States is willing to do likewise. But pressures (which are bound to increase after February 5) are also building to abandon those limits and begin deploying additional warheads.
In Washington, a powerful constellation of government officials, conservative pundits, weapons industry leaders, and congressional hawks is already calling for a nuclear buildup that would exceed the New START limits, claiming that a bigger arsenal is needed to deter both a more aggressive Russia and a more powerful China. As Pranay Vaddi, a senior director of the National Security Council, put it in June 2024, “Absent a change in the trajectory of the adversary arsenal, we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required, and we need to be fully prepared to execute if the president makes that decision.”
February 6 is likely to bring us into a new era—not unlike the early years of the Cold War—in which the major powers will be poised to ramp up their nuclear war-fighting capabilities without any formal restrictions whatsoever.
Those who favor such a move regularly point to China’s nuclear buildup. Just a few years ago, China possessed only some 200 nuclear warheads, a small fraction of the 5,000 possessed by both Russia and the US. Recently, however, China has expanded its arsenal to an estimated 600 warheads, while deploying more ICBMs, SLBMs, and nuclear-capable bombers. Chinese officials claim that such weaponry is needed to ensure retaliation against an enemy-first strike, but their very existence is being cited by nuclear hawks in Washington as a sufficient reason for the US to move beyond the New START limits.
Russian leaders face an especially harsh quandary. At a moment when they are devoting so much of the country’s state finances and military-industrial capacities to the war in Ukraine, they face a more formidable and possibly expanded US nuclear arsenal, not to mention the (largely unspoken) threat posed by China’s growing arsenal. Then there’s President Donald Trump’s plan for building a “Golden Dome” missile shield, intended to protect the US from any type of enemy projectile, including ICBMs—a system which, even if only partially successful, would threaten the credibility of Russia’s second-strike retaliatory capability. So, while Russia’s leaders would undoubtedly prefer to avoid a costly new arms buildup, they will probably conclude that they have little choice but to undertake one if the US abandons New START.
Many organizations, individuals, and members of Congress are pleading with the Trump administration to accept Vladimir Putin’s proposal and agree to a voluntary continuation of the New START limits after February 5. Any decision to abandon those limits, they argue, would only add hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal budget at a time when other priorities are being squeezed. Such a decision would also undoubtedly provoke reciprocal moves by Russia and China. The result would be an uncontrolled arms race and a rising risk of nuclear annihilation.
But even if Washington and Moscow were to agree to a one-year voluntary extension of New START, each would be free to break out of it at any moment. In that sense, February 6 is likely to bring us into a new era—not unlike the early years of the Cold War—in which the major powers will be poised to ramp up their nuclear war-fighting capabilities without any formal restrictions whatsoever. That comfortable feeling we once enjoyed of relative freedom from an imminent nuclear holocaust will also then undoubtedly begin to dissipate. If there is any hope in such a dark prognosis, it might be that such a reality could, in turn, ignite a worldwide anti-nuclear movement like the Ban the Bomb campaigns of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. If only.