The last nuclear guardrail falls this week, and the U.S. and Russia have chosen to fly blind

The dangerous drift toward a new arms race between Russia and the United States crosses another major threshold tomorrow, February 5, with the expiration of New START — the last treaty limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. Vladimir Putin has proposed a year-long extension to the agreement’s terms, but Donald Trump has stonewalled, citing U.S. concerns about a growing nuclear threat from China. Meduza reviews how Moscow and Washington arrived at this precipice, what experts think about the risk of nuclear escalation, and why the halt in mutual monitoring and data exchange is particularly worrisome.

The New START treaty represents the third chapter of an arms-control framework built before the Soviet Union’s collapse. Its roots lie in START I, signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, which committed both superpowers to slashing their arsenals from roughly 12,000 warheads each to 6,000. That initial success, however, gave way to a volatile history of failed agreements. START II, which aimed to ban land-based missiles with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), never entered into force. The architecture of mutual control began to crumble in earnest in 2002, when the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Moscow responded by scrapping START II, setting off a chain reaction of distrust that subsided only briefly during the Obama-Medvedev era.

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It was during the short-lived “Reset” that New START was born. The agreement capped deployed nuclear warheads at 1,550 and limited the number of delivery systems — ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and heavy bombers — to 700. Crucially, it codified a verification system: the treaty mandated on-site inspections, data exchanges, and notifications of asset movements. It required American and Russian military officers to verify each other’s silos regularly, reframing an existential standoff as a managed bureaucratic routine.

That routine is now dead. While Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden extended the treaty for five years in 2021, the invasion of Ukraine shattered the geopolitical trust essential to the treaty. By 2023, the Kremlin had “suspended” its participation, though it promised to respect the agreement’s numerical limits on warheads. Now, even those voluntary limits are vanishing.

Last fall, Putin publicly offered to extend the treaty’s terms for at least one year to buy time for negotiations, on the condition of a reciprocal pledge from Washington. Putin warned that a total collapse of nuclear arms control would be “erroneous and shortsighted.” This proposal reflected what Moscow Higher School of Economics Professor Vasily Kashin recently described as the Kremlin’s “comfort” with the strategic status quo. “Why should we set off an arms race and spend extra money on it? We don’t need to because we already have an advantage,” Kashin told the Financial Times on February 1.

Donald Trump, however, has described New START’s bilateral framework as a relic that ignores the rising threat posed by China. In a January 2026 interview with The New York Times, Trump dismissed Putin’s extension offer with characteristic bluntness: “If it expires, it expires.” His administration’s position is that any future deal must include Beijing, whose nuclear arsenal is racing toward 1,000 warheads by 2030, according to the Pentagon’s estimates. In response to these signals from Washington, hardliners in Moscow have even welcomed the end of New START. “No treaty is better than a treaty that merely papers over mutual distrust and triggers an arms race in other countries,” Dmitry Medvedev — now an outspoken hawk — told journalists in late January.

Without the treaty’s verification protocols, intelligence agencies will have to rely on satellite imagery and espionage to infer the other side’s activities, rather than on confirmed data. Rose Gottemoeller, the former U.S. negotiator for New START, warns that without the treaty’s constraints, Russia could upload warheads to its missiles significantly faster than the United States, creating a dangerous asymmetry. At the same time, other former U.S. officials have suggested that America is actually better positioned to grow its nuclear arsenal after New START expires. According to Reuters, Kingston Reif — a former Pentagon official now at the RAND research organization — said in a recent webinar that the United States could “roughly double” its deployed warheads, while Russia could add only 800. Both sides would need at least six months to make significant changes, he said. 

Whatever the reality, the loss of transparency breeds paranoia; when verification is impossible, militaries assume the worst-case scenario and build their defenses accordingly.

Meanwhile, new technologies that never fit neatly into the old arms-control treaties continue to destabilize the situation. The U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty under Donald Trump’s first administration, accusing Russia of breaching its obligations by working on the SSC-8 (Novator 9M729), a ground-launched cruise missile. More recently, Moscow has developed exotic delivery systems designed to evade U.S. defenses, such as the “Burevestnik” nuclear-powered cruise missile, the “Oreshnik” hypersonic ballistic missile, and the “Poseidon” nuclear-armed underwater drone. 

On the American side, Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to resume nuclear tests “on equal terms” not only with Russia, but with China. He has also championed the so-called “Golden Dome,” a concept for a missile-defense network with a 20-year price tag of $831 billion, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. Despite U.S. claims that the Dome would be a defensive shield, the project has raised concerns in Moscow that Trump is reviving the ambitions of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program to neutralize Russia’s strategic deterrent.

The expiration of New START means losing more than limits on nuclear weapons. “The [treaty’s] value was not in the caps themselves but in this whole system of inspections, data exchange, and notifications,” nuclear policy expert Pavel Podvig told the Financial Times. This communication and human interaction between rival militaries built a baseline of predictability. With the agreement dead, Moscow and Washington have traded that stability for a three-way race with Beijing, with no rules of the road.