Donald Jensen recalled the unease he felt as he boarded a plane bound for Pskov, Russia, in 1988 to visit eight Soviet missile bases, part of a groundbreaking arms control effort following decades of Cold War brinkmanship.
Months earlier, the United States and Soviet Union had signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in December 1987. The agreement committed both nations to eliminate ground-launched, mid-range nuclear missiles by 1991—the first arms reduction treaty of its kind—and introduced unprecedented verification measures, including onsite inspections.
A young foreign service officer, Jensen was among the first 10 Americans sent to the Soviet Union to verify compliance.
“As Americans coming to Moscow, we didn’t even know on the first inspection—which I believe was July 1, 1988—whether we would be shot down or what,” he said.
But the risk paid off. The inspection helped establish and rebuild some trust.
Jensen recalled a small structure with a door on one of the bases. One of his friends said he had been arguing for 15 years about what it contained. “So we wrote a report to open it up, and they did. And you know what was in there? Lizards.”
“So they didn’t cheat,” he added, laughing with relief.
Now, three and a half decades later, the countries appear to have reversed progress on nuclear arms control, and the future is increasingly uncertain.
President-elect Donald Trump pulled out of the INF Treaty in 2019, accusing Russia of failing to comply with the pledge. Russia followed shortly after. Onsite inspections stopped in 2020 and never resumed. The last remaining strategic arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia—the New START Treaty—is set to expire on Feb. 5, 2026. Negotiations for a new one haven’t started, and experts fear the two countries are running out of time.
“It makes things very uncertain and unpredictable, and that could lead to an unstable situation,” Robert Einhorn, a senior fellow in the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at Brookings, said.
Not enough time to re-negotiate
The New Start Treaty remains the last strategic arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia. It sets the limit for deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 and caps the number of carriers at 800, with just 700 of them allowed to be deployed.
Allowing the agreement to expire would create a regulation vacuum. But the two countries haven’t been able to kickstart the negotiation process, in part because of Russia’s outcry over U.S. support for Ukraine.
“The United States has urged Russia to begin discussions of strategic stability and what might succeed the expiration of New START, but Russia hasn’t been interested,” said Einhorn, who previously served as the U.S. Department of State special advisor for nonproliferation and arms control.
In a written response to the U.S. from Dec. 2, 2023, obtained by Arms Control Today, the Russian Foreign Ministry deemed Washington’s proposal to launch a bilateral dialogue about succeeding arms control framework “completely inappropriate” and “absolutely untimely,” citing Washington’s lack of interest in a “mutually acceptable settlement of the current crisis” in Ukraine and its unwillingness to consider “Russia’s security concerns.”
Moscow’s response echoed the sentiment of the countries’ last negotiations on nuclear arms control.
“In February 2022, as the war was starting, there was the last round of negotiations between the U.S. and Russia on this potential Framework Agreement. The Russians brought in lots of issues that have to do with, for example, the NATO relationship with Ukraine,” said Xiaodon Liang, a Senior Policy Analyst on Nuclear Weapons Policy and Disarmament at the Arms Control Association.
Even if Moscow and Washington resolve their disagreements over Ukraine under the new administration, experts say the countries would still not have enough time to create a treaty before this one expires.
“It would be overly optimistic to believe that solutions would be found before the expiration of New START,” Einhorn said.
For example, the New START negotiations reportedly lasted 15 months before the document’s signing in 2010.
“That’s really not enough time, and it hasn’t been enough time for quite a while,” Liang added.
The only viable solution in the current timeframe is reaching a temporary agreement between the countries to continue following the New START limitations until a new framework is finalized, both Liang and Einhorn agree.
The U.S. and Russia could say that they will abide by the numerical restrictions of New START on an informal, non-binding basis, giving the countries additional time to work out a formal successor to the treaty, Einhorn said.
“Neither side would be obligated to keep to those levels,” he added.
A new nuclear arms race is possible but disadvantageous for Moscow
The absence of a formal treaty, even if coupled with informal understandings, leaves the nations free to reassess their nuclear strategies, raising fears that the world is teetering on the brink of a new, high-stakes arms race.
But Russia is unlikely to be the one to start it, Liang said.
The U.S. could increase the number of deployed warheads without having to spend a lot of money buying new missiles because its launchers have the capacity to upload more than Russian ones, he explained.
That could increase the U.S. stockpile to a “much higher number” than Russia’s, he said.
If the two countries were to arm their delivery systems to accommodate the maximum number of possible warheads, the U.S. could increase the number of deployed strategic warheads to 3,570 on 715 strategic launchers. In contrast, Russia could increase the number of its deployed warheads to 2,629 on 533 existing launchers, according to a 2023 report by the Federation of American Scientists.
“So for Russia, there’s a reason not to start that down that path,” Liang said.
The country’s declining war economy is another factor that could undermine the ability to expand its arsenal.
The Kremlin has been unable to expand production fast enough to replace conventional weapons at the rate they are being lost on the battlefield, with around half of all artillery shells used by Russia in Ukraine now coming from North Korean stocks. The country is expected to face severe shortages in several categories of weapons, leaving little budget to pursue a costly process of expanding a nuclear arsenal.
Even maintaining and modernizing the current arsenal inflicts high costs for the country: Russia spent $37.3 billion on it over the past five years, according to the 2023 International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ report.
While expanding the nuclear arsenal seems unfavorable to Russia, it has been considered in Washington.
Senior Director for Arms Control, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation at the National Security Council Pranay Vaddi said in his June 2024 remarks that enhancing U.S. nuclear capabilities and posture was “incredibly important to rejuvenating strategic arms control.”
With America’s administration set to change, it is difficult to predict the future direction of these conversations.
“A new U.S. administration will have to conduct its own nuclear posture review and decide what will be necessary to strengthen deterrence, and there’s some who believe that the United States cannot rely on the strategic capabilities that it’s permitted under New START,” Einhorn said. “They believe that the United States may need to increase its strategic capabilities to deter both Russia and China.”
But Liang remains optimistic.
“I think the U.S. and Russia both have good reasons to want an agreement … to put a line underneath the relationship so that it doesn’t fall any further than it already has,” he said, referring to both countries’ concerns “about nuclear use and the nuclear arms race arising out of the Ukraine war.”
“So that is the first priority that we hope the Trump administration will take up and that the Russians will hopefully be receptive to,” Liang added.
