US President Donald Trump in no rush to sign new nuclear arms deal as Putin warns of unstoppable weapon

The deadline has been looming over Washington and Moscow for years.

Overnight, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expired. For the first time since 1972, it leaves both superpowers with no limits on the size or structure of their arsenals, at the very moment both are planning new generations of nuclear weapons and newly evasive means of delivering the deadly warheads.

Despite a new era of superpower confrontation, talks over a new treaty — or even an informal extension of the current one — never got off the ground, frozen by the war in Ukraine. When U.S. President Donald Trump was asked in January why he had not taken up President Vladimir Putin’s offer for a one-year informal extension, he shrugged.

“If it expires, it expires,” he told The New York Times in an interview. “We’ll do a better agreement” after the expiration, he insisted, adding that China, which has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal, and “other parties” should be part of any future accord. The Chinese have made clear they are not interested.

After the New START treaty’s expiration, Trump reiterated his call for a new accord, denouncing the previous one as “a badly negotiated deal” and declaring on social media that “we should have our nuclear experts work on a new, improved, and modernised treaty that can last long into the future.” But he said nothing about agreeing with Putin to freeze U.S. and Russian arsenals at current levels, leaving open the possibility of a renewed arms race.

In fact, the United States has been preparing for that possibility, and the Navy is already preparing to deploy more nuclear warheads on its biggest submarines. Meanwhile, Russia and China are now testing new types and configurations of nuclear weapons that few envisioned when the Senate, by a narrow margin, ratified New START in 2010.

Arms control was not supposed to end this way.

When President Richard M. Nixon signed the first arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, the banner headlines signaled a new era in which even the most hostile of Cold War rivals saw the danger of letting the arms race spin out of control.

Those early efforts had so many loopholes that the Soviet and U.S. arsenals grew fast, peaking at roughly 62,000 nuclear arms in the late 1980s. But then the numbers fell, treaty by treaty.

Now nuclear weapons are back with a vengeance.

The evidence is everywhere, from Putin’s plans for undersea and space-based nuclear arms to Xi Jinping’s decision to abandon China’s “minimum deterrent” and build an arsenal clearly designed to rival those of Washington and Moscow.

Trump’s first-term vow to disarm North Korea pushed the reclusive nation in the other direction, and his second-term confrontations with Europe have led its leaders to wonder if they can count on America’s “nuclear umbrella” — the promise that Washington would come to the defense of nonnuclear allies if they ever came under nuclear attack.

Not surprisingly, they’re now talking about establishing nuclear forces independent of Washington’s.

Many agree with elements of Trump’s argument that New START aged poorly and that a new treaty needs added participants.

“You wouldn’t negotiate the same treaty again,” Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear inspection body, said.

“There are new technologies that are not covered by the treaty — hypersonic missiles, undersea nuclear weapons, space weapons. And there are many other countries that, for one reason or another, feel now as if they may need a nuclear arsenal of their own.”

Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Poland are among the nonnuclear weapon states now discussing whether they need to change course.

And the United States itself is doubling down. Washington is spending US$87 billion ($132 b) this year on nuclear weapons, including a modernisation of its warheads and a hugely expensive replacing of aging missiles and bombers. When Trump announced a new kind of warship known as the “Trump class,” he quickly added that the vessels would be armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles, similar to some of the weapons China and Russia are now developing.

“We’re seeing the end to an era of arms control,” said Erin D. Dumbacher, a senior security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States helped two close allies — Britain and France — make small nuclear arsenals, but the strategy of “extended deterrence” kept most U.S. allies from building their own.

After the Soviet Union broke up, more than a dozen Central and Eastern European states joined the NATO alliance, and thus gained the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella. All told, on and off, it covered nearly 40 nations.

To the surprise of doom-mongers, the policy helped keep the peace.

Equally miraculous is that the world today has only nine nuclear-weapon states — the result of not only the umbrella but also of a global nonproliferation system, overseen by Grossi of the atomic agency, that lets states develop peaceful nuclear power as long they agreed to never make atomic weapons.

Of those nine, four have refused to sign or have renounced the nonproliferation treaty so that they could build their own arsenals: India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. (The other five were the “original” nuclear-weapon states: the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.)

Each of the nine adds, in different ways, to the global challenge of safely navigating the nuclear age.

While Trump often speaks about the fearsome power of nuclear weapons, he has presided over the disassembly of some of the main nuclear restraints that have largely worked for eight decades.

Trump portrays allies as freeloaders and has made clear that in an “America First” world, America’s safety and prosperity rank above defending foreigners. His National Security Strategy put it bluntly: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.”

Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on whether he would use nuclear weapons to protect allies, although he has not formally renounced the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

And already, there are signs that the Trump administration is planning to break out of the numeric limits of the New START treaty — not dramatically, but in ways that could easily trigger a new arms race. Along the way, they will make the most deadly element of the U.S. arsenal even deadlier.

That increase centres on the nation’s Ohio-class submarines. The undersea craft, 14 in all, are the largest in the U.S. fleet. Each one is 560 feet long — longer than the Washington Monument is high.

Each submarine is built with 24 tubes that can launch missiles, and each missile carries up to eight nuclear warheads. They include some that are 30 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

To comply with the limits of New START, the Navy disabled four tubes on each sub. Now, relieved of those restrictions, plans are moving ahead to reopen the tubes — allowing the loading of four more missiles onto each sub.

For the Ohio fleet overall, that’s 56 more missiles and possibly hundreds more warheads, each of which can be aimed at a different target.

Trump has never discussed that plan or given a speech on his nuclear strategy, although he signed an executive order to create a “Golden Dome” defence system meant to intercept rockets and missiles.

To Trump administration officials, this planned increase in deployed weapons puts foes on notice that if they attempt a nuclear strike, the retaliation could be larger than at any time in years. But there’s a counterargument: America’s deployment of new weapons — and the Golden Dome, if it ever gets off the drawing board — could fuel an arms race that raise the global risk of nuclear miscalculation and war.

When New START was negotiated, it covered only traditional “strategic” weapons, which can be delivered to targets on the other side of the world by bombers, submarines and ground-launched missiles. And it had only two signatories, the United States and Russia. China was considered such a small player, with less than 200 weapons, that it was barely discussed as the treaty was debated in the Senate.

Today, the world looks very different. Russia is experimenting — and claims to be preparing to deploy — what experts call new kinds of “superweapons” that Putin began to announce in 2018, during Trump’s first term.

In October, he announced a successful test of the Poseidon, an underwater drone meant to cross an ocean, detonate a thermonuclear warhead and raise a radioactive tsunami powerful enough to shatter a coastal city. Putin added that no interception was possible. Pentagon analysts say Poseidon’s small nuclear reactor gives it a range of 6,000 miles and a speed of more than 60 mph — much faster than any submarine.

For years, many experts dismissed Putin’s boasts about the Poseidon as bluster. But now the weapon appears to be real — as do his test launches to prepare for placing a nuclear weapon in space, a plan the Biden administration quietly warned Congress about two years ago. Both weapons could serve the same purpose: to defeat Trump’s Golden Dome.

Other concerns about Russia center on Putin’s repeated threats to use nuclear arms in Ukraine, eroding the taboo against wielding a nuclear weapon in a nonnuclear conflict.

China is also developing novel arms. In 2021, it fired a hypersonic missile into orbit that circled the globe — and flew over the continental United States — before deploying a maneuverable glide vehicle that could deliver a nuclear weapon anywhere on earth.

For the time being, it is the speed with which China’s conventional nuclear forces are growing that has seized the attention of Washington. A December report by the Pentagon stressed not only the increase in long-range weapons that could reach the United States but “highly precise theater weapons” that might be employed in a conflict over Taiwan — largely to keep the United States away.

Every effort by the Trump administration to engage China in some kind of discussion of its nuclear capabilities has been shut down by the Chinese. That leaves the United States with a choice: It can push ahead with larger arsenals and new, specialized weapons to keep pace with Beijing and Moscow, or negotiate a broader deal of the kind Trump talked about last month.

There is no evidence the latter will happen. Instead, strategists see a looming surge in moves and countermoves around the globe that could spark a crisis.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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