The New START treaty, the last remaining agreement regulating nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia, expires on 5 February, according to a commentary published by Anton Bendarzsevszkij, director of the Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation.
From midnight onwards, the world’s two largest nuclear powers will, in principle, be free to produce and deploy as many nuclear warheads and delivery systems as they choose. The New START agreement, signed during the presidencies of Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama, limited each side to a maximum of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and capped the number of delivery systems, including missiles, submarines and bombers, at 700 operational and 800 in total.
Beyond these numerical limits, the treaty’s most important element was mutual verification. The agreement allowed both sides to conduct several on-site inspections each year at missile silos and military bases, ensuring transparency and reducing the risk of deception.
Bendarzsevszkij noted that New START has effectively existed only on paper since 2020, yet its unextended expiration carries strong symbolic weight. Following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia no longer allowed foreign inspectors access to its military facilities, and in 2023 it formally suspended its participation in the treaty.
He described the past decade as an ‘era of treaty withdrawals’, calling the trend deeply concerning. In 2019, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, citing alleged Russian violations. In 2020 and 2021, both Washington and Moscow exited the Open Skies Treaty, which had enabled unarmed surveillance flights over each other’s territory. In 2023, Russia withdrew from the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty in the context of the war in Ukraine.
According to Bendarzsevszkij, this wave of treaty collapses has two main causes. One is the growing mistrust and instability characteristic of the current turbulent global period. The other lies in the transformation of the international system itself. Many arms control agreements were designed for a world shaped by the Cold War, when global power was dominated by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.
That bipolar world no longer exists. China, India and other emerging powers have gained influence, creating a far more complex global landscape. From Washington’s perspective, Bendarzsevszkij argued, it is increasingly difficult to justify restrictions agreed solely with Russia while other major powers remain outside any comparable framework. At present, there is no effective way to supervise the nuclear arsenals of countries such as China or India. This leaves two options: either redesign the system to include all relevant powers, or dismantle it altogether. The latter, he said, is what is currently happening.
The absence of arms control agreements does not merely mean more weapons, but a more dangerous world. While even a few hundred nuclear warheads would be sufficient to destroy civilization, the stability of the system depends on credible mutual deterrence. If that stability is undermined, the long-term consequences can be severe.
Should one side begin unlimited weapons production, others are likely to follow suit to avoid falling behind. This dynamic explains why, at the height of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union amassed between 30,000 and 40,000 nuclear warheads each. Today, those numbers stand at roughly 5,000 to 6,000 per country.
Military doctrine was built around redundancy, assuming that in a nuclear conflict many missiles would be destroyed on the ground, fail in flight, or be intercepted by defences. As a result, arsenals were expanded to ensure that even after a devastating first strike, enough weapons would remain to inflict total destruction.
If one side comes to believe it has enough capability to eliminate all of the other’s forces in a first strike, the logic of deterrence collapses. This, Bendarzsevszkij warned, is why a world without mutual nuclear limits is inherently unstable and dangerous.
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