February 2026 saw the end of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, the last nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. Without limitations on nuclear weapons, what comes next? Can scientists step in, as they did in years past, to help stop the risk of nuclear war?

There are now three major nuclear powers—the United States, Russia, and China—and six smaller nuclear-armed states (France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea). With the New START Treaty no longer in force, there is an opportunity for leaders of these nuclear states to create new treaties. US President Trump has said that he wants to do this and has plans to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping in 2026; he is also likely to meet Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during the year. These encounters may set nuclear negotiations back on course. But as Trump and his administration are swept into new crises in Venezuela and Iran, nuclear arms control could remain unresolved and stagnate for the remainder of his term.

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President Donald Trump told the New York Times in January that he wants to negotiate a better treaty than New START, a message he repeated on February 5, the day the treaty went out of force. Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, added, “The president wants to have our nuclear experts work on a new improved and modernized treaty that can last long into the future. And that’s what the United States will continue to discuss with the Russians.”

All of this is welcome. Many have complained that New START does not limit nonstrategic nuclear weapons, nor does it limit so-called Russian exotic weapon systems. It was not designed to do so. The United States’ goal has always been to take up nonstrategic nuclear weapons in the next negotiations, as called for in the resolution of ratification of New START. As for the exotic systems, they appeared on the scene after New START entered into force, and of course, they must be accounted for in any new treaty.

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, after mysteriously disappearing from the public eye for a few weeks, reemerged November 9 to give an interview to Russian news service RIA Novosti. He took a question about whether Moscow has proposed a meeting with Washington to discuss President Vladimir Putin’s offer to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) limits for one year beyond February 5, 2026, when the treaty goes out of force. With an exasperated edge, his specialty, Lavrov answered,

The constructive initiative put forward by President Vladimir Putin in the post-New START context speaks for itself. It contains no hidden agenda and is perfectly clear for understanding. Its practical implementation would not require any special additional efforts. Therefore, we do not consider it necessary to hold in-depth discussions on this proposal.… So far, there has been no substantive response from Washington.

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Not so long ago, Vladimir Putin took a step that astonished me: he called for extending the limits of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New Start) for one year beyond February 5, 2026, when it is due to go out of force. 

It was Putin who pulled the plug on implementing the treaty in February 2023, blaming Joe Biden for assisting Kyiv and not respecting Russia’s security interests. Now he seems to be having second thoughts, telling his Security Council that discarding the beneficial aspects of the treaty would be a mistake. 

Keeping the New Start limits in place will give additional time to President Donald Trump, who is enthusiastic about limiting nuclear weapons, to figure out what he wants to do not only with the Russians, but also with the Chinese, who are quickly building nuclear weapons in a way that has everyone worried.

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About the book:

Russian officials and experts often voice the view that the United States was hell-bent on undermining, even destroying Russia during the turbulent period of the Soviet breakup thirty years ago. The primary US goal, in this telling, was to expand NATO to Russia's borders to isolate and threaten the Russian state. Rose Gottemoeller, drawing from the historical record and her own professional experience, refutes this notion. Gottemoeller argues that, to the contrary, successive American presidents were convinced that deep cooperation with Russia is essential to international security and stability. This conviction was born during the George H.W. Bush administration and took definitive shape during the administration of Bill Clinton, when he and his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin agreed to develop technological cooperation that would be useful to both countries. George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin carried the conviction further, and the two countries made enormous strides on cooperation in outer space, counterterrorism, and nuclear energy over the next twenty years. While today is starkly different from the 1990s, Gottemoeller takes the lessons learned and considers what it would take—when Russia exits its horrific adventure in Ukraine and atones for the damage it has done—to resume cooperation for the sake of global security.

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Readers of the Bulletin might be surprised that I’m not gunning for an extension of the New START arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, but I am not. My reason is simple: Today’s US political reality mandates that the next arms control treaty has to be wholly owned by President Donald Trump if it is to be successful.

Only President Trump will have the power and influence to ensure that the treaty succeeds in gaining the advice and consent of the US Senate and is ratified. He has long been interested in getting an ultimate deal with Russia, and only he can work successfully with President Vladimir Putin to get what the United States needs out of an agreement. This assumes, of course, that the current impasse over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be either set aside for the negotiations or overtaken by a successful peace process—which would be the best outcome for the Ukrainians and everyone else, including the Russians. And the clock is ticking with New START expiring in February.

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On June 21, 2025, the United States executed a major military strike against Iran, targeting three of its most critical nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The Fordow facility, deeply buried beneath a mountain near the city of Qom, has long been considered Iran’s most secure uranium enrichment site. Its depth has been estimated at 80 to 90 meters underground, with a great deal of reinforced concrete to protect it from aerial bombardment. Natanz also has a less well-protected enrichment facility; it was the target of the Stuxnet cyberattack about 15 years ago.

The US operation, called “Operation Midnight Hammer,” involved a coordinated assault using B-2 Spirit bombers and a US Navy submarine. According to Pentagon briefings, seven B-2 bombers each carried two GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs designed to penetrate up to 200 feet of reinforced earth or concrete. In a 25-minute window, a dozen GBU-57 bombs were dropped on Fordow and two on Natanz. The submarine launched more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles against surface infrastructure targets in Isfahan.

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