The nuclear weapons developed in the Manhattan Project during World War II ended that war. Shortly afterward, as the Cold War started, there occurred a most important change in the mission of nuclear weapons from being weapons of war to guarantors of deterrence of war.
Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that we avoided the apocalypse of nuclear war largely because of the U.S. policy of strategic nuclear deterrence put in place in the Truman Administration in 1947. This policy had two essential components: nuclear testing, which maintained the credibility of the nuclear deterrent, and arms control, which maintained its stability. A bipartisan consensus to maintain this balance between testing and arms control helped make deterrence work for nearly 70 years, until President Trump began to upset the balance in his first term.
Many conservatives argued that ANY arms control was an unacceptable concession by the U.S. to Russia, but in fact, by limiting and stabilizing the arms race and setting inspection standards, these agreements were a huge benefit to us. They reduced the risk of nuclear war; allowed us to maintain necessary research, testing, and deployment; and avoided the need for even more expenditures on nuclear weapons.
The end of arms control — destabilizing nuclear deterrence — came on February 5, 2026, when President Trump allowed the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) to expire. New START was the last in a series of bilateral treaties between Russia and the U.S. It limited each side to 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and 700 strategic delivery vehicles — intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers. This is down from the approximately 15,000 weapons that each side had at the peak of the Cold War.
After negotiating for about a year, President Obama and Russian President Medvedev signed New START in 2010. After a heroic lobbying effort by President Obama against fierce opposition from some Republican hawks (detailed in my book Avoiding Apocalypse, Chronos Books, 2023), a bipartisan supermajority of the U.S. Senate ratified the Treaty and it went into effect in February 2011 for an initial ten-year term. The Treaty also had a provision that it could be extended for five years if both sides agreed.
As the expiration deadline of February 2021 approached, the two candidates running for President in the 2020 election staked out positions on opposite sides of the issue of extending the Treaty: Biden was for extension and Trump was against. Fortunately, Biden won, and one of his first acts upon his inauguration was to sign the extension agreement to keep the Treaty in force for another five years, until February 2026. He also began negotiating with the Russians for a new updated treaty to take account of new realities.
As the U.S.-Russia relationship deteriorated in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia suspended implementation of the data exchange and on-site inspection protocols of the Treaty. Russian President Putin, however, stated that Russia would still abide by the Treaty’s deployment limits.
All this changed with Trump’s return to the Presidency in January 2025. Not only did he dismantle so much of the State Department — including teams of experts who had devoted their careers to arms control — but he showed total disinterest in pursuing any follow-on to New START. In September, President Putin proposed a one-year extension to have time to negotiate a new deal with the U.S. Trump alternately dismissed or ignored the proposal.
Last December, at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Rose Gottemoeller, former Under Secretary of State in the Obama Administration and head of the U.S. negotiating team for New START, urged that the U.S. agree to a one-year Treaty extension and reinstitute full verification protocols, including on-site inspections. She asserted that this would buy time to agree on a follow-on treaty “without the added challenge of a Russian Federation, newly released from New START limitations, embarking on a rapid upload campaign.”
Trump would have done well to take Gottemoeller’s advice. Instead, he continued his usual pattern of disdain for expert advice and inventing specious reasons for why the U.S. was better off without the Treaty limitations.
In her excellent book (Negotiating the New START Treaty, Cambria Press, 2021), Gottemoeller makes the point that “negotiating a nuclear arms control treaty cannot be done on a drive-by basis. — You need sustained effort over a long period of time, by a dedicated delegation that stays in place to keep it up,” and, she concludes, “with good political leadership backing them up.” Obama and Biden provided that leadership. Trump has not. Instead, Trump’s go-it-alone approach, disdain for expertise, malignant narcissism, gross ignorance, and breathtaking incompetence may yet lead us all to nuclear apocalypse.et/contact-us.
Jeff Colvin has spent his professional career as a research physicist, first at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and then at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the two US nuclear weapons design laboratories. He lives in Gettysburg part-time and is chair of Gettysburg DFA Government Accountability task force.