For the first time in over half a century, the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world are operating without limits or inspections. Last week, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump effectively killed the last remaining arms control treaty between the two nations, New Start, signed in 2010, by letting it expire without replacement. That is just the beginning of the problem.
We have had setbacks in arms control before. But this is more than the end of an agreement. It is the deliberate destruction of the arms control regime. Worse, it is the consequence of the global rise of authoritarianism that now concentrates the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapons in the hands of strongmen rulers.
As Le Monde noted in an editorial, Russia and the United States are equally to blame for ending a process begun in the 1960s and marked by the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT) in 1972. The construction of over a dozen interlocking agreements over these decades worked to first limit the growth of nuclear stockpiles and then manage their reduction. We went from 70,000 nuclear bombs at the height of the Cold War to just over 12,000 today.
For authoritarian leaders like Putin and Trump, however, these treaties are a restraint on their power. Ending arms control is part of their assault on the global international order; part of the same impulse that caused Putin to invade Ukraine in violation of existing laws and Trump to rupture the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance in pursuit of territorial expansion. Although they may still agree to voluntary limitations on their weapons, these do not have the binding force of a treaty and can easily be violated. In their view, their power and wealth depend on military might, not pieces of paper.
Resumption of nuclear testing
Thus, they became serial killers of arms control in Trump’s first term. They both withdrew from the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbach; the Open Skies Treaty from 1992; and treaties limiting conventional forces, such as the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty and the Vienna Document on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures, also from 1990.
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