New START expired and nobody noticed

On February 5, 2026, the New START treaty expired without a replacement. For the first time in over half a century, there are no binding legal limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, which together hold nearly 90% of the world's nuclear weapons: roughly 5,177 warheads for the US, roughly 5,459 for Russia. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a "grave moment" for international peace.

New START, signed by Obama and Medvedev in 2010 and extended for five years by Biden and Putin in 2021, capped deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 per side and established an on-site inspection regime that gave both countries visibility into each other's capabilities. Russia suspended its participation in 2023 but said it would continue to abide by the numerical limits. Last September, Putin offered to maintain the limits for one additional year if the US reciprocated. Trump initially called it a "good idea" but no formal negotiation followed. When it expired, he said "if it expires, it expires… we'll do a better agreement" and proposed including China in a new treaty, something Beijing rejects on the grounds that its arsenal is far smaller.

What was lost is not just numbers. The verification regime is gone: 18 annual inspections, biannual data exchanges, missile launch notifications. It was the mechanism that reduced the chance of catastrophic miscalculation between two powers capable of destroying each other several times over.

The void arrives at the worst possible time. China is expanding its arsenal at a pace that could match the US and Russia in ICBMs by the end of the decade. Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defence pact with Pakistan in September that, while ambiguous, suggests some form of extended nuclear deterrence, the first between a nuclear state outside the NPT and an Arab country. In South Korea, a majority of the public favours developing nuclear weapons of its own. Japan is moving toward constitutional reform that would allow it to rearm. The era of arms control is over and the story barely got a couple of days of coverage, lost between Venezuela and the Iran talks. What comes next is likely a multi-sided arms race with no legal framework to contain it.