Nuclear arms race looms as US-Russia START treaty expires Thursday

A landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty is set to expire on Thursday, pushing the world into a nuclear situation it has not faced in more than five decades, one in which there are no longer any binding limits on the size of Russian or American nuclear arsenals, and no inspection regime to check what Moscow will do next.

Matt Korda, associate director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said… New START Treaty It forces both countries to rethink the assumptions that have guided nuclear planning for more than a decade.

“Until now, the two countries have planned their nuclear modernization programs based on the assumption that the other country will not cross those central limits,” Korda said. “Without those central borders… both countries will reevaluate their programs to accommodate a more uncertain nuclear future.”

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Russia had already suspended its participation in the New START Treaty in 2023, and froze inspections and data exchanges, but the expiration of the treaty eliminates the last legal framework governing the size of the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.

With no follow-up agreement, the administration insisted that it could not agree to arms control without China’s cooperation.

“The President has been clear in the past that to achieve true arms control in the 21st century, it is impossible to do anything that does not include China because of its huge and rapidly growing stockpile,” the Secretary of State said. Marco Rubio He said Wednesday.

President Donald Trump will decide the path forward on gun control “on his own timetable,” a White House official told Fox News. “President Trump has repeatedly spoken about addressing the threat that nuclear weapons pose to the world and has indicated that he wants to maintain restrictions on nuclear weapons and include China in arms control talks.”

Experts doubt that China might agree to limit its nuclear stockpile until it reaches parity with the United States, and Russia has said it will not pressure China to come to the negotiating table.

President Donald Trump said he called on President Putin for a ceasefire on Ukraine during the frigid weather, and the Russian leader agreed. (Andrew Harnick/Getty Images)

China aims to have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, but even that number pales in comparison to the Cold War giants. As of early 2026, the global nuclear hierarchy remains top-heavy, with the United States and Russia holding approximately 86% of the total global stockpile. The United States and Russia each have about 4,000 warheads, with approximately 1,700 each. Global nuclear stocks fell to about 12,000 in 2025, from more than 70,000 in 1986.

In February 2023, Russia announced the suspension of its participation in the New START Treaty, halting inspections and data exchanges under the treaty, while saying it would continue to respect numerical limits. But it recently put forward the idea of ​​extending the treaty for another year.

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Korda said this proposal reflects shared constraints rather than a sudden change in Russian intentions.

“It is not in Russia’s interest to significantly accelerate the arms race while its current modernization programs are going so poorly and its industrial capacity is constrained in Ukraine,” he said.

Without inspections and data-sharing, countries are forced to rely on their own intelligence, which increases uncertainty and encourages planning for the worst-case scenario, Korda said.

“Without on-site inspections, without data exchange, without anything like that, all countries have no national technical means left that would enable them to monitor each other’s nuclear forces,” Korda said.

As New START restrictions expire, experts said the immediate concern is not building new nuclear weapons, but how quickly existing warheads can be deployed. said Ankit Panda, a Stanton senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Russia can move faster from the United States in the near term by “loading” additional warheads onto missiles already in service.

“Loading will be a process of adding additional warheads to our intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles,” Banda said. “The Russians can be much faster than the United States.”

The United States and Russia have about 4,000 warheads. (U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Ian Dudley/Handout via Reuters)

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Large-scale loading won’t happen overnight, but force levels can still be changed over a relatively short period, Korda said.

“We are looking at a timeline of about two years and very large sums of money for each country to implement full loading across the entire force,” he said, adding that in a worst-case scenario, it could lead to “almost doubling the sizes of their deployed nuclear arsenals.”

But this advantage is limited by longer-term industrial realities. Panda noted that the US nuclear weapons complex lacks the production capacity it once had, which limits how quickly Washington can maintain a larger arsenal over time.

“The United States is currently unable to produce what would be the target of 30 plutonium pits,” a small fraction of Cold War production, he added.

Nicole Graevsky, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Russia’s ability to produce nuclear weapons may be faster than the United States in some parts of the development chain, but not all of it.

“Russia is very good at producing warheads,” she told Fox News Digital. “What Russia is essentially restricting is the delivery method aspect.”

This is especially true as the war in Ukraine continues, Graevsky added. Russia’s production of missiles and other launch systems depends on facilities that also support conventional weapons used in warfare, limiting the speed at which Moscow can expand the intercontinental missiles, submarine-launched weapons and bombers that form the core of the New START treaty.

The New START Treaty, which limits US and Russian nuclear warheads, expires on Thursday. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

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As a result, Grayevsky said she is less concerned about the rapid buildup of those forces covered by the treaty than she is about Moscow’s continued investment in nuclear systems that fall outside conventional arms control frameworks.

“What is even more worrying is the progress Russia has made in asymmetric domains,” she added, pointing to systems such as the nuclear-powered Poseidon torpedo and nuclear-powered cruise missiles, which are not covered by current treaties.

president Donald Trump He previously said he wanted to continue arms control with both Russia and China before proposing to the United States to resume nuclear testing.

“If there’s ever a time when we need nuclear weapons like the kind of weapons we’re making that Russia has — and which China has, to a lesser extent, but will have — that will be a very sad day,” Trump said in February 2025. “This will probably be forgettable.”

But in October he announced: “Because of the testing programs of other countries, I have instructed the War Department to begin testing our nuclear weapons on an equal footing. This process will begin immediately.”