What would become of the nuclear stability, when the last series of common measuring sticks is lost? New START or the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was not a friendship treaty. It was an engineering-oriented tool: ordinary definitions, counting rules, notifications, and inspections, which were aimed at maintaining the most devastating forces on Earth readable to the enemy. As its expiration occurs, the world can move to a state nuclear planners subconsciously fear, the state of capability being suggested, not demonstrated, and purchases being made on the ground of what the other party is doing in the back room.
The defeat to Russia is not a mere technical one. New START was a qualification. What Moskovy could boast of that Washington was held to the same ledger -1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 deployed delivery systems, even as the conventional power and economic base of the country began to appear less like that of a superpower and more like a region-heavyweight trapped in a strait jacket. When the treaty expires, the paper architecture which aided the maintenance of parity claims also expires.
The visibility was the most underrated feature of New START. The treaty was constructed on the basis of data interchanges, notifications and on-site checks, which minimized chances of misunderstanding the normal activity as preparation of a strategic attack. That system already had been humiliating over the years: inspections were discontinued, and Russia withdrew in 2023, followed by the United States. But still in their debilitated way both parties kept giving signals of conformity to the central boundaries a clumsy demonstration that bonds may be important where confidence is wanting.
Expiry eliminates the final agreed structure of the two biggest arsenals. It also resuscitates an old game, worst-case planning. With no agreed image of the force posture, both governments have incentives to “upload” more warheads on existing missiles, to change the positioning of both bombers and submarines and to re-base assumptions of readiness. All of those steps do not need theatrical decisions in public life, they may come out as a gradual reaction towards uncertainty.
The more profound change is institutional. Arms control had been effective in the Cold War since it bought time, time to decipher the warning, time to communicate, time to escape irreversible decisions. That time buffer was now narrowed, as the earlier guardrails went flying away. The rationale behind the constraints that were originally written into the ABM Treaty and the INF Treaty held that a dangerously narrowed decision window could be avoided by restricting some systems. One description of the design of arms-control explained it this way: “‘Trust but verify’ was not rhetorical decoration; it was a functional principle underpinning strategic stability.”
What has complicated the situation today is the environment that New START was never designed to handle. The strategic missile defense ambitions: the push by the U.S. to expedite state-of-the-art defenses in the so-called project of the Golden Dome, are in contact with the offensive limits in the sense that Moscow has long considered unbreakable. In the meantime, the multipolar reality, of which Russia frequently speaks, is two-sided: the arsenal of China is generally estimated at 600 warheads, and the stocks of both Washington and Moscow are more than 5,000 warheads each. The considered preconditioning of limits with wider participation can have only one effect that no limits whatsoever, which is the fear of all nuclear managers.
Shortly after a post-New START world would make the question as to who is “winning” less about the dramatic issue but more about the economic issue of how to curb catastrophic miscalculation. In case the predictability was the signature of the treaty era, its loss leaves the status claims bare, particularly that of Russia, and forces all the rest to work with thin information and tighter assumptions.
