With the End of the New START Treaty, Nuclear Anarchy Has Arrived

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The vacuum left by the expiration of the New START Treaty offers the United States a rare chance to lead a multilateral reset of nuclear arms control.

The New START Treaty, the last binding agreement limiting the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, expired on February 5, 2026. For more than half a century, since the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in the early 1970s, American and Soviet (later Russian) leaders had operated under some form of negotiated restraint on their most powerful weapons.

That era has now ended. There are no longer legal caps on deployed strategic warheads, no mandatory data exchanges, no on-site inspections, and no regular forum, such as the Bilateral Consultative Commission, to address compliance concerns or resolve disputes.

President Donald Trump has described the lapse as an opportunity to work toward a “new, improved, and modernized treaty,” and emphasized the need to include China in future arrangements. Russia, for its part, proposed last year that both sides voluntarily observe the old numerical limits for an additional year, though without verification measures, and Washington has not formally accepted. The result is a vacuum: the world’s two largest nuclear powers can, in principle, upload additional warheads onto existing delivery systems with no transparency or agreed boundaries.

This is more than the loss of one agreement. It represents the collapse of a bilateral, bipolar arms-control architecture built for a world that no longer exists. This framework presumes two main players with similar strength and a mutual desire for predictability. We currently operate in a tripolar, increasingly........

© The National Interest