As of this writing, little is known about the Trump administration’s intentions with regard to renewing the treaty. 

While Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his desire to extend the treaty, it is possible that Trump is being influenced by a coterie of neoconservatives to hold off on extending New START. 

Meanwhile, the usual chorus of unreconstructed hawks who staff most of DC’s think tanks are urging the administration to hold off, as it would be seen as a “reward” to Vladimir Putin. 

Others claim extending New START is contrary to US national security interests.

We believe this line of thinking is both short-sighted and dangerous. In order to draw public (and hopefully Congressional) attention to the risks involved of not renewing, we present the following contributions from experts in arms control, international relations, and US-Russian affairs who believe the Trump administration ought to renew New START.

—Katrina vanden Hevel and James W. Carden for ACURA

Cynthia Lazaroff is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy. She is author of Dawn of a New Armageddon, a personal account of the Hawaii missile scare published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Hiroshima Day.

The Doomsday Clock is ticking closer to midnight.

New START, the last remaining arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia, the two countries which together possess 87% of the world’s estimated 12,241 nuclear weapons, is set to expire on February 5^th.

The stakes are high.

Abandoning New START’s nuclear warhead limits could lead to the unchecked expansion of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and accelerate the perilous arms race underway between the U.S., Russia and China. More nuclear weapons will not make us safer but instead increase the likelihood that they will one day be used, whether by accident, blunder, miscalculation,  mistake or intention.

Wargaming exercises conducted by nuclear war planners and experts that simulate scenarios involving the U.S. and Russia that start with the use of one nuclear weapon repeatedly end up in an apocalyptic escalation to full-scale nuclear war.  A global all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia would kill a minimum of 360 million people directly, and an estimated more than 5 billion people would die of hunger due to a global famine caused by nuclear winter.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry has sounded the alarm on the terrifying nuclear risks of our time: “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger,” he told me in an interview in 2017, five years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Because we don’t understand the dangers, we make no serious attempt to repair the hostility between the United States and Russia, and so we are allowing ourselves to sleepwalk into another catastrophe. We must wake up.”

It’s time to wake up.

To back us away from the brink, Trump should make a deal with Putin now to continue to abide by the New START Treaty limits on intercontinental-range nuclear weapons which cap each side’s deployed nuclear warheads at 1550.

At the same time, the two leaders should agree to abide by the treaty’s verification provisions, including data exchanges, notifications on movements of strategic forces and on-site inspections. They should also restart a dialogue and cooperation on nuclear risk reduction.

This would buy time. Time to end the threat of nuclear war before it’s too late.

The only way to eliminate the possibility of nuclear Armageddon wiping out humanity is to eliminate nuclear weapons.

This is why Trump and Putin should build on the momentum of extending the New START limits and take the bold step of opening negotiations on denuclearization which the U.S. President has suggested he wants.

Disarmament is the way forward. The goal of these negotiations should be the irreversible and verifiable reduction and elimination of all nuclear weapons. This would fulfill U.S. and Russia’s mutual obligation to negotiate a treaty for complete disarmament as mandated by Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Such action would demonstrate leadership by the presidents of the two largest nuclear possessor countries and lay the groundwork for engaging China and the other nuclear-armed states down the line. The U.S., Russia and all nuclear-armed states should join the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now signed or ratified by the majority of the countries in the world.

Skeptics say this is delusional, naïve, all an impossible pipe dream. And who can blame them, given the high geopolitical tensions, the war raging in Ukraine, and the toxicity in U.S.-Russia relations.

But they are sleepwalking on the gravity of what’s at stake. If we are to survive our planet’s most dangerous time, it’s an existential imperative that Trump and Putin act now to preserve the world for future generations and take steps to end the threat of nuclear annihilation forever.

Cynthia Lazaroff is the Founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy and NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth.  She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the author of Dawn of a New Armageddon.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University.

In 1962, US President John F. Kennedy stated in his State of the Union Address that “the world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.” Kennedy was talking about all of humanity and not just a single person, and the threat of nuclear warfare as a world-ending event, rather than some singular act. Today, arguably more than ever, humanity needs to work ever harder to eliminate nuclear weapons that could destroy human civilization and possibly life itself.

In a world where nine states are nuclear-armed, and each of them could begin a chain of events that leads to nuclear annihilation, this task is rather complex. But the first step in the necessary journey is quite clear – the United States and Russia must come together to negotiate reductions in their arsenals, each of which on its own could cause hundreds of millions of deaths from explosions alone and billions more from ensuing environmental changes. With nearly 90% of the world’s arsenals and warheads numbering in the thousands, the United States and Russia have a responsibility to initiate the process of winding down the nuclear age.

Fifteen years ago, an important step in limiting both the number of warheads and the delivery vehicles on the part of the two countries was achieved with the New START Treaty. Its impending expiration is not only a threat to the prospect of disarmament, but could lead to a potential reversal in the reductions that the world had seen since the end of the Cold War. If the treaty is not extended and subsequently re-negotiated, we could return to a trajectory of arsenal increases, rather than decreases (or no changes) that have characterized the past four decades.

The United States government should accept the offer of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to extend New START for another year, and should subsequently push for negotiations for an enhanced New START or a replacement treaty. There is not a moment to lose.

Paul R. Grenier is President of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. He worked for many years as a simultaneous interpreter for the U.S. Defense and State Departments, serving as lead interpreter for US Central Command’s peacekeeping exercises with post-Soviet states. 

It is hard to see how America’s interests are well served by convincing powerful states that we are not only untrustworthy, but also irrational and possibly insane.

In my 2024 essay, (The Need for Trust: Reflections on the Quincy Institute’s ‘The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine’), I noted that, thanks to deceptions of various sorts, the Russian state was losing any incentive to trust the United States.  More recent actions taken by, or participated in, by the United States, show evidence of something worse than untrustworthiness. They suggest an American side that may have taken leave of its senses.

It is well known that, according to Russia’s published military doctrine, an attack on critically important Russian state or military facilities can activate a nuclear response.  Despite this, the US/CIA has, as far as we know, actively supported Ukrainian attacks on Russian strategic assets (the attack on the Belaya air base in Irkutsk).  Although the US side now (unconvincingly) denies it, it appears that we also supported Ukraine’s Dec. 29, 2025 assassination attempt on President Putin (the attack on his Valdai residence in Novgorod).

Today, to this already disastrous diplomatic atmosphere, ideological fans of American hegemony want to add the further insult of abandoning the New START treaty, the sole remaining vehicle of arms control between the two nuclear superpowers.

What arguments do they mobilize in support of taking this step?

Atlantic Council VP Matthew Kroenig tells us we should abandon New START, among other reasons, because the Russian and Chinese leaders are evil. “Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping,” Kroening writes, “care less about the well-being of their citizens and more about their own lives, their regimes, and their militaries.”   Therefore, argues Kroenig, there should be no limits on how many missiles target Russian command and military centers.  And yet Kroenig’s argument is plainly circular. Putin and Xi don’t care about their own people because they are evil. How do we know they are evil? Because they don’t care about their own people.  Meanwhile, would it not be easy enough to demonstrate that, for at least the last century and right up until the present moment, U.S. leaders have shown remarkable indifference to human life? Should the American state therefore also be targeted from the outside with an unlimited number of warheads?

Kroenig argues that “Russia has violated almost every treaty it has signed.”  To support this very questionable assertion, Kroening links to an American Academy of Arts and Sciences paper which, though it provides some not very impressive supporting evidence, also notes that it is the United States that  has repeatedly withdrawn from key arms control agreements, as it did with Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2017 — even though, as this same article points out, “In both cases the counterparts—Russia and Iran—were complying with the agreements.” (emphasis mine)

What is striking about these arguments against preserving arms control is how weak they are.  They begin with their conclusion. In the present case, that conclusion is that America’s nuclear weapons development must face no restrictions. Subsequent assertions are then measured not against their truth value, but against their utility for supporting this pre-determined conclusion.

As we may learn from G.K. Chesterton, rationality of this kind — which revolves around a closed circle of assumed ‘facts’, all the while divorced from the messiness and moral ambiguity of reality — is the ‘rationality’ of the insane.

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at  American University and co-author, with Oliver Stone, of The Untold History of the United States.

The world has entered a dangerous new phase of superpower confrontation and potential war. On June 10 of this year, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a powerful two-and-a-half minute video that began with devastating scenes of atomic bomb-caused destruction in Hiroshima and warned that “we are…closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.” On October 20 of this year, Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Agency SVR, said, “The world is now experiencing the most fragile moment for international security since World War Two.”

We should heed their warnings. The progress we have made in reducing nuclear arsenals from the 1980s peak of 70,000 to under 13,000 today is being reversed and all nine nuclear powers are modernizing their arsenals to make them more accurate and more lethal. If New START is not extended, we will plunge headlong into a new Cold War-style nuclear arms race and very likely a period of global nuclear anarchy. There will be no binding legal restraints upon the size of nuclear arsenals for most nuclear powers, aside from the universally ignored Article 6 of the NPT, which should, but does not, constrain the five original nuclear powers.

The U.S. and Russia–the parties to New START–possess 87 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and relations between the two nuclear behemoths blow hot and cold over Russia’s highly provoked but still unwise invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s unprovoked and unjustified bombings of Iran and Venezuela. Both countries are poised to dramatically increase the size of their nuclear arsenals when New START ends in less than a month. Russia has already introduced a series of terrifying new nuclear weapons and delivery systems—the Oreshniks, Burevestniks, and Poseidons. The U.S. is pouring $1.7 trillion into its own 30-year modernization with Trump demanding a 50 percent jump in military spending in the new budget.

Extending New START while negotiating an expanded new treaty is necessary but not sufficient in light of recent developments. On August 20, 2024, New York Times’ David Sanger reported that the U.S. is planning to simultaneously fight a nuclear war against Russia, China, and North Korea. That same day, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists carried an even more alarming article by Jack O’Doherty explaining that U.S. nuclear planners were divided between those who still believed in deterrence theory based on the threat of mutually assured destruction and those who believed technological advances made feasible a preemptive strike knocking out the other side’s retaliatory capability, including, for the first time, its nuclear-armed submarines.

Added to this lunacy is the danger of nuclear proliferation. 73 percent of South Koreans say they want their country to develop its own nuclear weapons. In November, Foreign Policy published an article arguing that Japan should develop its own nuclear weapons. Five days earlier, Foreign Affairs wrote that Japan, Germany, and Canada should do so. Zelensky has called for Ukraine to have nuclear weapons. Other countries are itching to get their hands on them as well, especially in response to recent attacks that make countries feel the only way to protect against what happened in Ukraine, Iran, or Venezuela is to have nuclear weapons.

Fears of war between the U.S./NATO and Russia or China keep growing. In 2023, Gen. Mike Minihan predicted war with China in 2025. Others say 2027. In November, Admiral Thomas Buchanan described U.S. plans to win a three-front nuclear war and keep enough weapons in reserve to maintain U.S. hegemony. This should be a wakeup call if one is still needed. Extending the New START Treaty in such volatile and precarious times is an absolutely necessary first step if we want our species to continue, but we must do much more and quickly if we want to avert the risk of nuclear war and annihilation.

Emma Claire Foley is Campaign Director of Defuse Nuclear War at RootsAction.

U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are already more than capable of destroying civilization as we know it. Mainstream policy discourse around the U.S. nuclear arsenal has largely been captured by a basic assumption that more nuclear weapons are better, an approach that relies on unrealistic assumptions of control, restraint, and perfect knowledge in a scenario where nuclear weapons are used.

Many such analyses assume that political problems can be effectively addressed with military solutions, and that diplomacy is somehow a weakness. It favors instead keeping the United States on the brink of conflict with Russia and China as the only way to prevent conflict from occurring.

And, as the fate of the nuclear sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) program suggests, it’s very possible for the nuclear weapons policymaking process to produce weapons that lack a clear strategic purpose in anyone’s mind. Without New START, there will be one fewer check on the many factors that drive the continued development of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.

Criticism of the treaty frequently focuses on the need instead for arms control negotiations including the U.S., China, and Russia. These three countries should indeed take steps toward trilateral arms-control negotiations. Yet such negotiations would require tremendous work as well as policy sacrifices from the United States that are not forthcoming. Extending the treaty is a relatively easy, mutually beneficial step well within the Trump administration’s demonstrated capabilities that would help maintain a marginally safer status quo than what would exist without the treaty.

Those who advocate allowing the treaty to lapse and adopting still more aggressive nuclear weapons policies fatally underestimate the risk inherent to possessing nuclear weapons and keeping them ready to use. The road to a more peaceful order is walked with concrete steps toward limiting the potential for conflict, not endlessly pursuing global American military dominance.

In 2018, historians Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano wrote a book titled The Russians Are Coming, Again. The title was a play on the popular 1966 anti-Cold War movie The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. If one listens to Europe’s leaders today, it quickly becomes clear the Russians are definitely coming again. Nearly four years into the Ukraine war and a year into the Trump Presidency, the conflict continues to take thousands of lives and decimate Ukraine. But unlike during the Biden era, it is the European leaders now that drive the push not only for this war to persist, but for a direct war with Russia by the end of the decade, if not sooner.

As it has become increasingly evident that Ukraine’s battlefield position is steadily if incrementally worsening at the same time that its corruption scandal is dragging down President Zelensky and those around him, including the once-powerful Andrey Yermak, European political, military, and intelligence leaders have been discussing openly the imminence of war with Russia in an increasingly desperate, voluble, and shrill manner. The more Zelensky’s position weakens and the worse Ukraine’s battlefield prospects become, the more Zelensky and his European backers seem to dig in their heels, resisting concessions that would end the war, including territorial changes that Putin demands after nearly four years of fighting, limits to the size of Ukraine’s army, and a formula for security guarantees that does not include NATO membership for Ukraine nor troops from NATO countries.

The Trump Administration’s newly released National Security Strategy (NSS) chastised the Europeans for being delusional regarding their “unrealistic expectations” when it comes to settling the nearly four-year-old war. But that hasn’t deterred them from seeking a peace plan that, unlike the original 28-point plan, promulgated by Stephen Witkoff and Jared Kushner after speaking with both Russians and Ukrainians, ignores Russia’s red lines in its Ukraine-friendly 20-point alternative. The NSS was so contemptuous of Europe, warning it faced “civilizational erasure” and political irrelevance, that European leaders attempted to prove their importance and resolve by rallying even more strongly around the Ukrainian cause. Recognizing that they could no longer count on the same level of U.S. military support that they had since the Cold War ended, the Europeans endeavored to find a way to rebuild their own defenses while assisting Ukraine. That promise amounts to keeping Ukraine in the fight at any financial or human cost, while frightening the European publics into ponying up whatever money is needed for rearmament. To justify cuts to the social programs that had enriched European life in recent decades, the leaders took a page from the old Cold War playbook, using the threat of Russian military aggression ⎯ a threat made credible by the Russian invasion of Ukraine ⎯ to convince peace-loving Europeans that the danger was palpable and the situation urgent.

The persistent justification for continued war is the logic-defying claim that a Russian “victory” in Ukraine will bring bloodthirsty Russian hordes to Europe’s capitals. As Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General said on December 11, Europe is Russia’s next target and the war could begin by 2029. “Conflict is at our door,” he warned and Europeans need to prepare for a war reminiscent of World Wars I and II, “for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured… a conflict reaching every home, every workplace, destruction, mass mobilization, millions displaced, widespread suffering and extreme losses.”

From Blaise Metreweli, the new head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency who highlighted the “expansionist and revisionist Russia,” to France’s highest military official General Fabien Mandon who warned “of a major high-intensity war outside national territory in Europe, which would involve France and its allies, particularly European allies, by 2030,” to Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’s demands that Germany become “war-ready” instead of “defense-ready” as early as 2028, the echoes of Rutte’s warnings have been loud, clear, and far too dangerous. Mandon went so far as to warn French governors that they had to be ready “to accept losing [our] children” in the coming war. Italian Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, NATO’s top military official as chair of NATO’s Military Committee, has even stated that “preemptive strikes could be considered defensive actions.”

These pervasive threats have led the Wall Street Journal to report on December 15, “European security officials now regularly broadcast a message nearly unimaginable a decade ago: Get ready for conflict with Russia. Rarely a week goes by now without a European government, military or security chief making a grim speech warning the public that they are headed toward a potential war with Russia. It is a profound psychological shift for a continent that has rebuilt itself after two world wars by trumpeting a message of harmony and joint economic prosperity.”

Europe’s elected officials have not been left far behind in fueling the war fever sweeping the continent. German Chancellor Fredrich Merz has compared Putin’s war in Ukraine to Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in 1938, and the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned that “Putin’s aggression does not stop in Ukraine.” France’s Macron has also maintained that Russia has no intention of stopping in Ukraine. Russian aggression “knows no borders,” he warned in March in a nationally televised speech. He asked, “Who can believe today that Russia would stop at Ukraine?”

It is striking that the three hawkish heads of state who form the backbone of the “coalition of the willing” and who are leading their citizens down the primrose path are deeply unpopular at home. While the numbers fluctuate, upon last reading, Macron’s approval rating was between 11 and 15 percent; Starmer’s at 19 percent; and Merz’s at 25 percent. Still, recent polling suggests that the scaremongering is having the intended effect. A poll released on December 4 showed that a slight majority of citizens in nine European countries believe that there is a “high” or “very high” risk of war with Russia, including 77 percent of Poles, 59 percent of Belgians and Dutch, and half of Germans, French, and Spanish. Only 34 percent of Italians agreed. Still, only a third of EU citizens told a Gallup poll in March 2024 that they would be willing to fight to defend their country, a number that bottomed out at 14 percent in Italy and stood at 23 percent in Germany.

European leaders’ resolve was never more apparent than at the recent meetings in Berlin where the “coalition of the willing” came up with a menu of ways the Europeans could provide security guarantees for Ukraine, ranging from boots on the ground to financial aid to intelligence support. There, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared, “Now we have a simple choice — either money today or blood tomorrow. And I am not talking about Ukraine only, I am talking about Europe.” “All European leaders have to finally rise to this occasion.”

Well Donald Tusk need not worry. All European leaders, with a couple of glaring exceptions, have risen to the occasion and are broadcasting the idea that Putin’s Russia is a mortal threat to Europe. They, along with their allies in the military, intelligence community, “defense” sector, and media have convinced more than half of Europe that Russia was knocking at the door, ready to invade. While the thought that a Russia that had taken four years and hundreds of thousands of casualties to conquer 20 percent of Ukraine would want to take on NATO—with or without U.S. nuclear backing—is a dangerous form of scaremongering and preposterous to many, intelligent people keep repeating this idea.

Among those who think it absurd and has repeatedly said so is Vladimir Putin himself. President Putin dismissed such charges as “hysteria” by Europeans who had been “indoctrinated with fears about an inevitable clash with Russia.” “I have repeatedly stated: this is a lie, nonsense, pure nonsense about some imaginary Russian threat to European countries. But this is being done quite deliberately,” he said. Russian leaders have even offered to put this in writing.

And yet, the mainstream media keep sticking to the script. A December 19 Reuters article stated that, “U.S. intelligence reports continue to warn that Russian President Vladimir Putin has not abandoned his aims of capturing all of Ukraine and reclaiming parts of Europe that belonged to the former Soviet empire, six sources familiar with U.S. intelligence said, even as negotiators seek an end to the war that would leave Russia with far less territory.”

US Director of Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, responded angrily to a post by one of the Reuters authors, reaffirming this conclusion. She wrote, “No, this is a lie and propaganda @Reuters is willingly pushing on behalf of warmongers who want to undermine President Trump’s tireless efforts to end this bloody war that has resulted in more than a million casualties on both sides. Dangerously, you are… fomenting hysteria and fear among the people to get them to support the escalation of war, which is what NATO and the EU really want in order to pull the United States military directly into war with Russia. The truth is the US intelligence community has briefed policymakers, including the Democrat HPSCI member quoted by Reuters, that US Intelligence assesses that Russia seeks to avoid a larger war with NATO. It also assesses that, as the last few years have shown, Russia’s battlefield performance indicates it does not currently have the capability to conquer and occupy all of Ukraine, let alone Europe.”

It seems that according to the US intelligence chief, the Russians are NOT coming. Whether or not this assessment will reach the European halls of power remains to be seen.

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Chemistry at Columbia University.