The agreement between the United States and Russia limiting both countries’ nuclear weapons will expire on Thursday, marking the first time in more than five decades that the two sides will not have an active and binding framework to regulate their nuclear arsenal.
The end of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty comes as both Russia and China are rapidly building up their strategic arsenal, which pose new risks for the U.S. as it considers possible new agreements with not one but both nuclear powers.
“China is poised to become an even greater threat [than Russia],” Sen. Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said during a hearing on Tuesday, adding that Chinese leader Xi Jinping “is committed to displacing the U.S. and is rapidly building the capacity to do so.”
Thursday marks the expiration of New START, an extension of previous agreements that went into effect on Feb. 5, 2011, and it limited each country to 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Russia suspended its participation in the treaty in 2023, after agreeing to a five-year extension in 2021, which predated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
There were conversations about a possible one-year extension to New START but it will not come to fruition before its expiration, and there were questions about whether the U.S. could negotiate a new agreement with both Russia and China instead of limiting its and Russia’s capabilities, leaving Beijing to expand its nuclear arsenal unconstrained.
Retired Admiral Charles Richard, the former commander of U.S. Strategic Command, told the Armed Services Committee he is against a one-year extension of New START “absent verification procedures being reinstated,” because it “does not constrain Russia to the same way that it constrains us. It prevents us from answering the challenge that China has added to this, and it increases the uncertainty because it doesn’t have the verification mechanisms built in that were so successful in the past.
“I am very concerned about the possibility of opportunistic or coordinated aggression, either between major powers such as Russia and China and or the regional ones,” he said. “Again, I had to deter them all, and so the simple numerical comparisons don’t completely capture the complexity [of] what the U.S. has to have in order to deter two peers at the same time that have to be deterred differently.”
The Pentagon estimates that Beijing has more than 600 operational nuclear warheads in its stockpile as of 2024 and is expected to have more than 1,000 of them by the end of the decade, according to a 2025 Department of War report to Congress.
Richard warned that when he was the head of STRATCOM, any intelligence assessment regarding China’s military strength, he would “double it or triple it” to get “closer to where” their actual tally is, while halving assessments “in terms of time.” He said he believes this “rule of thumb seems to have held” since his retirement.
Rose Gottemoeller, who was the chief U.S. negotiator of New START with the Russian Federation, told lawmakers at the hearing that it is her belief that U.S. should negotiate with the Chinese and Russians “in parallel” rather than jointly.
“I do not support trying to do a trilateral negotiation,” she said. “I believe that these negotiations should be done in parallel. We have 50-plus years of experience now limiting and reducing nuclear weapons with the Russians. We can continue that kind of process with them at this point, not necessarily to reduce, but to continue to limit and control nuclear weapons.”
“If it expires, it expires. We’ll do a better agreement,” President Donald Trump told the New York Times in January. “China should be a member of the extension. China should be a part of the agreement.”
The president also said he believes Jinping would “be a willing participant,” even though Chinese officials have publicly said otherwise.
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“China’s position on a trilateral negotiation with the U.S. and Russia on nuclear arms control is clear,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said on Tuesday. “China’s nuclear strength is by no means at the same level with that of the U.S. It is neither fair nor reasonable to ask China to join the nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.”
New START had been the only remaining nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 during his first term.
