Nearly every week since taking office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump has had something to say about controlling nuclear weapons. In comments to Fox News in March, for example, he referred to these weapons as “big monsters” and the world’s “greatest existential threat,” lamenting that the United States spends “all this money on something that, if it’s used, it’s probably the end of the world.” The president’s interest is fortuitous. Amid the turbulence of his administration, on this particular matter, Trump’s inclination toward nuclear restraint could push him to negotiate real restrictions—at a time when the world badly needs such measures to succeed.

Nuclear arms control is dying. The 2010 New START Treaty is the only remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. New START, for which I led negotiations on the U.S. side, limits the number of nuclear warheads, missiles, and launchers each country can deploy and includes various mechanisms to verify implementation. But it is due to go out of force in less than a year, in February 2026. And its efficacy has already been weakened. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared in February 2023, a year after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that Moscow would cease to implement the treaty as long as the United States continued to assist in Ukraine’s defense—linking the fate of nuclear arms control to an extraneous issue for the first time in the nearly 60 years of nuclear negotiations between Moscow and Washington. The Kremlin has been unwilling to engage in any kind of nuclear discussion ever since.

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