Barring a major unforeseen announcement from Washington or Moscow, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia will expire on Wednesday.
It’s been a long, slow death for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which went into force in 2011 to replace the earlier post-Cold War START treaty and place limits on both countries’ arsenals of deployed nuclear warheads and launchers. Originally slated to expire in 2021, it was extended for five years after an agreement between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, with just two days left before the deadline.
That proved to be one of the last moments of productive diplomacy between the two countries before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In February 2023, Putin announced that Russia was suspending its participation in the verification measures under the treaty, but would continue to abide by its numerical limits. Now, neither side is bound by those limits, raising concerns of a return to the era of arms races.
The world today is a much different place than it was in 2010, when New START was negotiated. The treaty was a product of the short-lived “reset” in US-Russian relations, during the President Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev presidencies, as well the optimistic era for arms control that followed Obama’s landmark 2009 Prague speech calling for a world without nuclear weapons.
Now, the world is on the precipice of what some call a new nuclear age, one in which these weapons are returning to the center of global politics after a post-Cold War lull. Russia has routinely threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine; Trump has called for a resumption of nuclear testing in the United States; and US allies, concerned about the reliability of American security guarantees, are more openly discussing developing their own nuclear capabilities. Meanwhile, the US and Russia still possess the overwhelming majority of the world’s nukes — but that could change. China’s rapid nuclear build-up is threatening to create a complex “three-body problem” for arms control. And the integration of new technologies like artificial intelligence into nuclear systems could lead to destabilizing new dynamics for deterrence.
It’s a pretty bleak picture overall, and the disappearance of the last major arms control agreement binding the world’s two nuclear superpowers only makes it bleaker. Still, for all his bluster, and the antipathy he showed to arms control agreements in his first term, President Donald Trump has suggested in the past that he’s open to “denuclearization” talks. And compared to other presidents, he’s certainly not averse to cutting a deal with the Russians. “When you take off nuclear restrictions, that’s a big problem,” Trump told reporters in July, and he hasn’t made clear what he’s actually going to do once the deal expires.
So, is there any hope for getting nuclear talks back on track, or are doomed to a new arms race? To get some perspective on that question, Vox spoke with Rose Gottemoeller, who, as assistant secretary of state for arms control in the Obama administration, was the chief US negotiator in the talks that led to New START. Gottemoeller later served as deputy secretary general of NATO from 2016 to 2019 and is now a lecturer at the Stanford University Freeman Spogli Institute and a fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does New START actually do?
Well, the New START Treaty limited the strategic offensive nuclear forces of the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 delivery vehicles — those are missiles and bombers that are used to deliver nuclear weapons. Those basic limits have held now for about 15 years.
As of Wednesday, unless something else happens, and there’s no agreement by President Trump and his administration to extend the limits of the treaty, then we will be in a situation where there will be no limits.
Is there any chance of it being extended?
People have been talking kind of loosely about this, but the treaty cannot be extended. It’s a legally binding document, and it goes out of force next Wednesday. But what President Putin proposed back in September was to extend the limits of the treaty for another year in order, as he said, to prepare time for further negotiations.
That’s a political handshake. We’ve done that before. Indeed, when I was negotiating the New START Treaty, START went out of force in December of 2009, and we — on the basis of a political handshake with Moscow — agreed to extend the limits of START for what turned out to be another year plus.
So, what could actually happen now that these limits are no longer in place?
A couple of things could happen. The United States could quickly announce that it’s going to proceed with a campaign to upload its warheads. You could put more warheads on our intercontinental ballistic missiles and on our strategic strike submarines.
Or, maybe, the United States will take some time to make that announcement. [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov and [Kremlin spokesman Dmitri] Peskov have said that, as long as the United States stays within the limits of New START, Russia will stay within the limits of New START. So, the administration really doesn’t need to make any announcement. If it wants to, it can just let the status quo remain.
President Trump has spoken repeatedly about wanting to hold talks about reducing the number of nuclear weapons with Russia, China, and other countries. Is there any evidence diplomacy like that is actually taking place?
You’re right. Even going back to the 1980s, the president has been very interested in nuclear disarmament, and since he returned to office last January, he’s been very out there saying that he’s interested in what he calls “denuclearization.” He’s been very clear that he wants to negotiate with Xi Jinping and with Vladimir Putin to control nuclear weapons, and he’s hinted several times, in his recent conversations with those two men, that he’s talked to them about nuclear negotiations. But at the moment, I don’t see any signs that those negotiations are being prepared. I don’t see any signs out of Washington or any diplomatic activity that would suggest that there are some quiet behind the scenes talks going on.
If there were actually serious energy being devoted to this, do you think that it’s even realistic we could have meaningful arms control talks with the Russians right now given the war in Ukraine?
That’s certainly the linkage that Putin established in February of 2023, when he declared that Russia would no longer implement the monitoring and verification measures of the treaty. And the Trump administration, at least at the moment, seems to be saying that, yes, until we get Ukraine resolved, we can’t really move forward on these new talks with the Russians on nuclear matters.
But I keep reminding people that, in the past, we used to deconflict nuclear negotiations from anything else going on in the relationship. We had a terrible time during the Cold War with severe differences over the war in Vietnam, over the wars in the Middle East, and still, we were able to establish the first detente and agree to the first strategic arms deals with the USSR.
So, historically, we’ve always said these weapons are weapons of mass destruction. They are existential to human survival. So, they are so important that we need to talk no matter what. I think we could return to that approach pretty easily if we wanted to. We’ve known each other and been in this business together for a long time.
How does China’s rapid nuclear build-up complicate this picture? An argument you sometimes hear is that we need to bring the Chinese into the discussion, because otherwise they will just keep expanding their arsenal while we limit ours.
The first thing I’ll say is that, unlike the USSR and Russia, where we’ve had this 55-year relationship at the nuclear negotiating table, we don’t have that with the Chinese, and that creates a different overall comfort level for both sides. We’re just not used to talking to each other about these issues, and the Chinese, in particular, have been very, very resistant to discussing in detail what their objectives are with their nuclear modernization.
And I really fault them for that. If they’re looking for nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence to provide them some stability in the relationship, they need to come clean on what their intentions are, because otherwise, there’s always a worry about them arms racing and seeking strategic advantage. So, that’s an important difference between Russia and China.
I will say, I don’t believe that we should try to shoehorn China into nuclear negotiations with the United States and Russia, because the numbers are still too disparate. They have, at this moment, approximately 600 total nuclear warheads. The United States and Russia each hold a total of approximately 4,000 warheads and deploy approximately 1,550. So, the numbers are still vastly different, and that’s why I keep saying to people that we have no need to panic about this Chinese buildup.
We’ve seen it coming. We’ve received strategic warning that they are doing something different now. So, let’s take the time and make the effort to figure out what their objectives are and take control of this build-up so we don’t end up with the kind of two-nuclear-peer threat that so worries Washington. That’s my bottom line: Let’s take a chill pill here. We’ve got time to work on this problem.
How might new technology — whether it’s hypersonic missiles or the integration of artificial intelligence into command-and-control systems — complicate future arms control negotiations or change the type of agreements we might seek going forward?
I’ve generally looked at new technologies as an opportunity for the nuclear arms control arena, because I think it can improve the sophistication of how we’ve done monitoring and verification and accounting for nuclear systems. There are technologies that will help us in maintaining stable nuclear deterrence.
I do worry about what the effects [of artificial intelligence] will be on first-strike stability, and that’s why President Biden sat down with Xi Jinping in Lima and agreed to make sure there’s always a person in the loop for nuclear command and control decision making. That was an early and important step.
And then, I also worry that the very same technology that improves our ability to find and track mobile missiles could eventually, at some point, be an issue, even for our submarine-based forces.
So, yeah, I think there’s downsides and upsides to the technology revolution, and we need to be thinking together with other nuclear armed states about how to sustain nuclear stability going forward, given everything we can see coming at us in the technology race.
The nuclear threat was constantly discussed in the early months following the invasion of Ukraine, when it seemed quite plausible that Putin might follow through on his threats to use nuclear weapons in the conflict. Do you still think that’s a concern, or are you less worried about it now?
I think it’s gone way down. There was real concern in our government in the fall of 2022 that the Russian army was being defeated, and therefore, Putin was very tempted to use nuclear weapons. Some have even said there was a 50-50 chance nuclear weapons could be used as the Russian army was fleeing Ukrainian advances in the southeast of the country. I think a couple of things have happened since then.
First, Putin now feels like he’s got the momentum. He keeps pressing hard in the Donbas along the front lines. He keeps losing troops, but he’s not going away anytime soon. I do hope these talks that Trump and his administration have been pushing can produce results, but Putin’s in a much more confident place than he was back at the beginning of the war.
The second thing I think is a really interesting phenomenon, and it’s the way both Xi Jinping in Beijing and also Narendra Modi in Delhi pressed Putin back during that period in late 2022 not to use nuclear weapons. Those two men even spoke publicly to Putin in November of 2022 during a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Kazakhstan; they reproved him publicly. And I said, “Wow, that never happens.” They never say anything in public to reprove each other. But both of them stated that nuclear weapons should not be used in Ukraine. So, I do think that that has been effective, and it has perhaps tamped down the nuclear saber rattling among the top leadership.
Looking back over the past 15 years, are there steps that could have been taken so that we didn’t get to this point — so that we’re not left, effectively, without any arms control between the US and Russia?
People don’t remember this anymore, but you may recollect President Obama was quite ambitious. He had this so-called Prague Initiative. New START was supposed to be the first of several nuclear arms control and reduction agreements that he wanted to negotiate in his time in office.
And, you know, once Dmitry Medvedev was removed from the presidency [in 2012], and Putin stepped back into that role, there was no love lost between Obama and Putin, and Putin simply declared that he was not willing to negotiate anymore with the United States until the limits of New START were achieved in 2018. The treaty entered into force in 2011, and we had the period between 2011 and 2018 to achieve those reductions. And, by saying that, Putin very clearly signaled to Obama: “I’m not talking to anybody — forget about it.”
That was essentially the death of the Prague Initiative, from my perspective. So, yeah, we could have had other agreements in place by this time if that more positive trajectory in the US-Russia relationship had continued. By 2014, with the seizure of Crimea by the Russians, and destabilization of the Donbas, the relationship between Washington and Moscow was sliding downhill fast. And it’s only gotten worse over the ensuing decade-plus.
This story was produced in partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners.