Additional Coverage:
- World enters uncharted era as US-Russia nuclear treaty expires, opening door to fastest arms race in decades (foxnews.com)
Historic Nuclear Treaty Expires, Ushering in Uncharted Waters for Global Security
A pivotal nuclear arms reduction treaty is set to expire this Thursday, thrusting the world into a nuclear landscape not seen in over five decades. The expiration of the New START treaty means there will no longer be binding limits on the size of Russia’s or America’s nuclear arsenals, nor an inspection regime to verify Moscow’s future actions.
Matt Korda, associate director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, emphasized that this development forces both nations to re-evaluate long-standing assumptions guiding their nuclear planning. “Up until now, both countries have planned their respective nuclear modernization programs based on the assumption that the other country is not going to exceed those central limits,” Korda stated. “Without those central limits… both countries are going to be reassessing their programs to accommodate a more uncertain nuclear future.”
Russia had already suspended its participation in New START in 2023, halting inspections and data exchanges. However, the treaty’s full expiration removes the final legal framework governing the size of the two countries’ nuclear stockpiles.
The Biden administration has indicated that it cannot agree to new arms control without China’s cooperation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio affirmed on Wednesday, “The president has been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile.”
A White House official informed Fox News that President Donald Trump will determine the path forward on arms control “on his own timeline.” “President Trump has spoken repeatedly of addressing the threat nuclear weapons pose to the world and indicated that he would like to keep limits on nuclear weapons and involve China in arms control talks.”
Experts remain skeptical about China’s willingness to limit its nuclear stockpile until it achieves parity with the U.S. Russia, for its part, has stated it will not pressure China to join the negotiating table.
China aims to possess 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, a figure that, while significant, still pales in comparison to the massive arsenals held by the U.S. and Russia. As of early 2026, these two Cold War giants collectively hold approximately 86% of the world’s total nuclear inventory, with around 4,000 warheads each and close to 1,700 deployed.
Global nuclear stockpiles have seen a significant decline from over 70,000 in 1986 to approximately 12,000 in 2025.
Despite its earlier suspension of the treaty, Russia recently floated the idea of a one-year extension. Korda suggests this proposal reflects shared constraints rather than a fundamental shift in Russian intentions. “It’s not in Russia’s interest to dramatically accelerate an arms race while its current modernization programs are going so poorly and while its industrial capacity is tied up in Ukraine,” he explained.
Without inspections and data exchanges, nations are forced to rely solely on their own intelligence, leading to increased uncertainty and encouraging worst-case scenario planning. “Without those onsite inspections, without data exchanges, without anything like that, all countries are really left with national technical means of being able to monitor each other’s nuclear forces,” Korda noted.
With the New START limits gone, the immediate concern among experts is not necessarily the construction of new nuclear weapons, but rather the speed at which existing warheads could be deployed. Ankit Panda, a Stanton senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, highlighted that Russia could potentially “upload” additional warheads onto its existing missiles faster than the United States.
“Uploading would be a process of adding additional warheads to our ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles,” Panda clarified. “The Russians could be much faster than the United States.”
Korda indicated that a large-scale upload would not happen overnight but could still significantly alter force levels within a relatively short timeframe. “We’re looking at maybe a timeline of about two years and pretty significant sums of money for each country to execute a complete upload across the entire force,” he said, warning that in a worst-case scenario, this could “roughly result in doubling the sizes of their deployed nuclear arsenals.”
However, this potential advantage is tempered by longer-term industrial realities. Panda pointed out that the U.S. nuclear weapons complex currently lacks the production capacity it once had, limiting how quickly Washington could sustain a larger arsenal over time. “The United States is currently unable to produce what is going to be a target for 30 plutonium pits,” a mere fraction of Cold War output, he stated.
Nicole Grajewski, also a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that while Russia may be faster than the U.S. in some aspects of nuclear weapons production, this isn’t true across the board. “Russia is very good at warhead production,” she told Fox News Digital.
“What Russia is really fundamentally constrained on is the delivery vehicle side of it.” Grajewski added that this constraint is particularly evident amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine, as Russia’s production of missiles and other delivery systems relies on facilities also supporting conventional weapons used in the conflict.
This limits how quickly Moscow could expand the intercontinental missiles, submarine-launched weapons, and bombers that were central to New START.
Consequently, Grajewski expressed less concern about a rapid buildup of these treaty-covered forces and more about Moscow’s continued investment in nuclear systems that fall outside traditional arms control frameworks. “What is more concerning is Russia’s advances in asymmetric domains,” she explained, citing systems like the Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo and nuclear-powered cruise missiles, which are not covered by existing treaties.
President Donald Trump has previously advocated for arms control with both Russia and China, though he later suggested the U.S. should resume nuclear testing. In February 2025, Trump remarked, “If there’s ever a time when we need nuclear weapons like the kind of weapons that we’re building and that Russia has – and that China has, to a lesser extent, but will have – that’s going to be a very sad day.
That’s going to be probably oblivion.” However, in October, he declared, “Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.
That process will begin immediately.”