The United States is approaching a decisive moment in its management of nuclear risk. New START—the last remaining arms control agreement between the United States and Russia—is scheduled to expire on Feb. 5. Signed in 2010, New START has helped limit nuclear competition between the world’s largest arsenals by capping warheads and delivery systems and enabling inspections and data exchanges.
Although Russia suspended inspections and halted treaty-mandated data exchanges in 2023, protesting U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine, it promised to maintain treaty limits and has since offered to extend those limits by one year if the United States agrees to do the same. Both sides have expressed interests in further nuclear arms control talks, and since returning to office, U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced support for “denuclearization” talks with Russia and China and has said Russia’s extension offer “sounds like a good idea.” Yet the deadline rapidly approaches with no formal response from his administration.
Skepticism of Russia’s intentions is warranted, given its recent behavior. But rejecting the extension, either outright or through inaction, would place the United States in a more complex and uncertain strategic environment precisely when the risks of miscalculation are rising.
A common argument against extending New START is that it does nothing to address China’s expanding arsenal. But this is precisely why the treaty remains essential.
For the first time, Washington must deter two major nuclear powers whose forces are growing in parallel. China’s rapid buildup—including new missile fields, more survivable delivery systems, and increased warhead production—has already forced U.S. planners to rethink long-term deterrence strategy. If New START collapses, the United States would face simultaneous uncertainty about both Russian and Chinese force trajectories, requiring planning for the most demanding potential combinations of expansions on both fronts.
This is an exceptionally expensive and destabilizing way to manage nuclear competition. The U.S. nuclear modernization effort is projected to cost more than $1.5 trillion over three decades and is already over budget and behind schedule. Even if all benchmarks were met, unconstrained competition risks diverting U.S. resources toward perpetual hedging and erodes the predictability that underpins crisis stability.
A one-year extension, paired with a restart of on-site inspections or bilateral data exchanges, would reduce uncertainty on several fronts. It would allow Washington to focus analytical and diplomatic resources on understanding China’s evolving posture while increasing combined U.S. and Russian leverage to incentivize China to join the ranks of responsible nuclear leadership by establishing its own nuclear dialogue. In this sense, extending New START reduces—rather than exacerbates—the difficulty of managing a two-peer nuclear problem.
Another critique of extending New START is practical: If Russia has suspended inspections, ceased data exchanges, and refused certain notifications, what exactly is being extended, and how does it benefit U.S. interests?
The answer is the legal and institutional structure and ongoing mutual restraint that make restored verification possible. Even in suspension, New START anchors the strategic baseline, preserving a structure that steers future talks toward similarly robust treaty mechanisms.
Verification regimes do not reappear automatically once they collapse. If New START expires, its mechanisms disappear entirely—along with its definitions, oversight bodies, and channels for resolving compliance issues. While Trump recently claimed that “if it expires, it expires. … We’ll just do a better agreement,” this process of negotiating an agreement from scratch historically takes years and requires a perfect storm of political conditions that will not exist for the foreseeable future.
Even in its current, strained state, New START’s structure gives the Trump administration several useful tools and options for engaging with Russia without having to renegotiate a new treaty and gain approval from the U.S. Senate. They only require political will and execution. The treaty establishes the categories, counting rules, and processes that both sides previously relied on. It also houses the Bilateral Consultative Commission, the body responsible for resolving technical and implementation issues, and codifies the rules and parameters for data exchanges. Even partial transparency would immediately improve the accuracy of U.S. force planning and reduce reliance on costly worst-case assumptions.
The choice, therefore, is not between perfect verification and no agreement. It is between maintaining a platform that can support verification in the future and eliminating the last framework capable of containing strategic uncertainty.
Russia’s willingness to extend New START is not altruistic. It reflects a clear strategic calculus. With a GDP roughly one-tenth and a defense budget roughly one-sixth that of the United States, Russia faces greater constraints in sustaining long-term nuclear modernization. Moscow has a strong interest in preventing a period of fully unconstrained U.S. expansion, and that asymmetry creates leverage for Washington.
And restraint is in the United States’ strategic interest as well, mitigating the skyrocketing cost of a three-way arms race while shoring up the nuclear order that helped sustain its global dominance for decades. Even narrow, interim transparency directly serves U.S. interests. It would improve U.S. intelligence assessments, reduce pressure for worst-case budgeting, and allow modernization investments to be prioritized more efficiently.
Crucially, the extension also would not constrain U.S. modernization timelines. Instead, it would create a more predictable strategic environment in which modernization could proceed without the pressure to plan simultaneously for every potentially adverse scenario.
Accepting the extension and then pushing for the restoration of data exchanges, limited notifications, and a pathway toward reactivating inspections would be advantageous for both parties. It offers the benefits of resolution without the Herculean effort of negotiating a new treaty, simply reinstating functions that existed prior to 2023.
The state of U.S.-Russian arms control is not merely a bilateral issue.
First, it directly affects allied perceptions of nuclear risk and the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence. When the world’s major nuclear powers abandon transparency and limitation structures, allied publics and policymakers naturally question their own adherence to the nuclear order. Russia’s nuclear signaling in recent years has revived debates within NATO about forward deployed systems, shared burdens, and the future of nuclear posture in Europe. In East Asia, debates in Japan and South Korea about developing independent nuclear capabilities have become increasingly mainstream.
Renewing New START—even for one year—is a way for Washington to buy some badly needed good press with allies and signal that it is committed to transparency, predictability, and responsible risk management in at least one area of its foreign policy. These core components of allied reassurance help ensure these allies remain partners rather than problems for shoring up the nonproliferation regime.
Meanwhile, the broader nonproliferation system is also under acute strain. Iran and North Korea continue to advance their capabilities. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review process has struggled to produce consensus. States with advanced civilian nuclear programs are increasingly questioning whether the traditional trade-offs underpinning abstinence remain stable.
In this environment, the behavior of the established nuclear powers carries outsized influence.
The complete absence of U.S.-Russian limits would further weaken nonproliferation norms and make it harder for the United States to mobilize international support for sanctions, monitoring, and export controls in the future. Even adversarial states closely watch how dominant nuclear powers manage their own arsenals when assessing their commitments.
Extending New START will not, by itself, revive multilateral nonproliferation diplomacy, but it strengthens the foundation on which such diplomacy operates. As with arms control during the Cold War, preserving bilateral limits can open pathways to broader mechanisms and multilateral follow-on agreements that incrementally build more comprehensive agreements. This history demonstrates that even amid deep tensions, Washington and Moscow can find common ground for reducing nuclear risk.
Washington should accept the extension and use it to restore the structures that keep nuclear competition stable, predictable, and firmly aligned with U.S. strategic priorities.
A viable strategy should include three elements: First, accepting the one-year extension as is and then stipulating that further cooperation is contingent on restored transparency. Second, capitalizing on the extension period by reintroducing incremental verification steps, including renewed data exchanges and on-site inspections. And third, treating the extension not as a final solution but as a bridge to longer-term strategic stability discussions with China as well as Russia.
A short extension would not be a concession to Russia. It would preserve a framework that allows the United States to restore oversight mechanisms, manage a period of simultaneous modernization among several nuclear powers, and stabilize a broader nonproliferation system under strain. Even a limited agreement would buy time for U.S. planners to modernize efficiently and reassure allies who increasingly question whether the international order that has constrained nuclear proliferation for five decades is beginning to erode.
None of this requires optimism about Russia’s intentions. It requires only a sober assessment of whether the United States is better served by a strategic environment with even limited transparency and guardrails or by one of unconstrained competition and complete opacity.