Newscasts - The Russia-US nuclear treaty is expiring — what comes next?

Procore Technologies

03/02/2026 23:11

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Description: The last Russia-U.S. nuclear arms control treaty, known as New START, is due to expire on February 5. We look at what the treaty does, what its expiration would mean and what it may take to establish a new treaty. Alex Cohen has more.

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Video Transcript:

The last Russia-US nuclear arms control treaty known as New START is due to expire on February 5. Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed that the two sides stick to existing warhead limits for one more year to buy time to work out what comes next. On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov warned that time was running out.

For the first time, Russia and the US, the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, will now have a basic document that limits and controls these arsenals. We believe this is very harmful for global strategic security. Our proposal remains on the table for the remaining days before the treaty expires.

US President Donald Trump has not formally responded to Putin's offer. He said in January that if it expires, it expires and that the treaty should be replaced with a better one. New START was signed in 2010 by US President Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, an ally of Vladimir Putin who served a single term as Russia's president.

Finally, this day demonstrates the determination of the United States and Russia, the two nations that hold over 90% of the world's nuclear weapons, to pursue responsible global leadership.

It set limits on strategic nuclear weapons, the kind that each side would use to strike the opponent's vital political, military, and industrial centers in the event of a nuclear war. The number of deployed strategic warheads was capped at 1,550 on each side, with no more than 700 deployed ground or submarine launch missiles and bomber planes and 800 launchers. The treaty text says it can only be extended once, and it already was in 2021 under former US president Joe Biden. Now, it's expiring, leading to Putin's push for a year‑long informal agreement. If Moscow and Washington cease observing mutual limits on their long-range nuclear arsenals, it will mark the end of more than half a century of constraints on these weapons. Prokhor Tebin is Head of the Head of Center for Military and Economic Research at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. He says the current treaty is central to preventing nuclear conflict.

The New START, like previous agreements in this sphere, is one of the most important and key instruments of arms control. Its aim is to ensure nuclear deterrence, strategic stability between the Russian Federation and the United States of America, and at the same time avoid uncontrolled arms race and some particular escalatory risks.

Without a new agreement, each side would be free to increase its missile numbers and deploy hundreds more strategic warheads. However, experts say this poses some technical and logistical challenges and would not happen overnight. Arms control advocates are concerned about heightened nuclear risks, especially at a time of increased international tension because of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. For the US, a key concern is China's growing arsenal. It now has an estimated 600 warheads, but the Pentagon estimates it will have more than 1,000 by 2030. Trump says he wants to pursue denuclearization with both Russia and China, but Beijing says it is unreasonable to expect it to join disarmament talks with two countries whose arsenals are far larger. Russia says the nuclear forces of NATO members, Britain and France, should also be up for negotiation, which those countries reject. Also, experts say a successor treaty would probably need to address other classes of nuclear weapons.