Why President Trump should put off the new nuclear arms race for one more year

Bulletin, By Jon B. Wolfsthal | September 26, 2025

On September 22, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia would be willing to abide by the limits in the New START nuclear arms control treaty for an additional year if the United States did the same. Both the United States and Russia are parties to the treaty. That agreement commits both countries to deploy no more than 1,550 strategic offensive nuclear weapons.

The agreement was negotiated in 2010 and is set to expire in February of next year.[1] After it expires, there will be no restrictions on the number and types of nuclear weapons that those two countries can build and deploy. The treaty was extended for one five-year term in 2021, but it cannot be legally extended as a formal treaty a second time.

While both sides stopped fully implementing the verification provisions under the treaty during the COVID-19 epidemic, Russia refused to restart them in 2022 after it launched its war against Ukraine. Yet even so, both Washington and Moscow are complying with the treaty’s central numerical limits. Without a new agreement, however, the world’s two largest nuclear weapons states would coexist without any caps on their arsenals for the first time in two generations.

Extending the deal by a year, even informally, would be a security and diplomatic win for the United States. However, as with many things these days, nothing is simple.

Words need action. US President Donald Trump announced at the United Nations on September 23 that he’d like to cease the development of all nuclear weapons (and biological weapons) “once and for all.” Trump has previously said that he would like to negotiate new nuclear agreements with Russia and to find a way to include China in those efforts. But to date, neither his first nor current administration has delivered any results on those fronts.

There are also voices both inside and outside of the Trump administration who maintain that Washington should not agree to any new limits with Moscow, and that the United States needs more nuclear weapons to address the threats posed by Russia and China combined. These voices are rightly concerned about Russia’s aggressive behavior and the rapid growth of China’s nuclear arsenal. They are also increasingly worried about coordination and cooperation between Russia and China, as well as with North Korea and Iran—known increasingly as the “Axis of Upheaval.”

While these concerns are legitimate, the need to respond to them with immediate increases in US nuclear deployments is questionable. Today, China has an estimated total nuclear arsenal of roughly 600 weapons, and is adding about 100 per year. The United States has just over 3,700 nuclear weapons, and Russia is thought to have just over 4,300. At the current rate of increase, it will take China almost 30 years to reach parity with the United States.

There is simply not enough time to realistically address the longer-term concerns about Chinese and Russian nuclear capabilities before New START expires in February. The question, therefore, is whether the United States and its allies would be more secure with having a one-year extension of the New START limits or living in a world in which all countries can build as many nuclear weapons as they want, and the United States has turned down an offer to maintain at least some caps in place.

The US administration should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here and should agree to a one-year extension of New START as long as it is confident that it can monitor Russia’s compliance with the central limits. As of today, there is every reason to believe that it can, although the increasing politicization of US intelligence agencies is a growing concern.

Better restraint than arms racing. The one-year deal on offer should be pursued for at least two reasons.

First, there is no compelling military rationale for the US to increase the number of warheads above the limit set in New START. No such statement has been made by the president, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Commander of US Strategic Command. Ultimately, a decision to build and deploy military capabilities should be driven by military necessity. In the absence of such a statement or compelling case, the money, time, and effort needed to deploy more weapons over the near term would be better used to enhance US conventional and other military capabilities. This does not mean the United States should stop preparing to possibly increase the number of deployed weapons if needed, but available information suggests that may not be needed any time soon.

The United States advances three reasons to maintain its nuclear weapons: to deter its adversaries and those of US allies, to reassure allies that the United States can and will come to their defense, and to limit the damage that an adversary can do to the United States or its allies should deterrence fail. In the US system, it is the president who determines how many nuclear weapons are needed to achieve these goals.

Deterrence theory makes clear that deterrence can work if one country can hold at risk the things that matter most to its adversary. (Whether the threat of using those forces is credible is another issue.) The United States is very capable of holding key Russian and Chinese leadership and valued targets at risk even within the New START limits. That has been and remains true today.

Another critical role for US nuclear weapons is to reassure US allies. This need is greater than ever, and some support for increasing US nuclear weapons comes from this motive. However, if the US goal is to reassure allies of Washington’s commitment to their security, then there are much greater problems the United States must address—including the egregious use of tariffs against key partners and allies, the abusive detention and deportation of South Korean workers in the United States, and the seemingly random and unpredictable nature of President Trump’s statements and behavior toward US allies overall. Yes, allies are eager for the United States to convincingly recommit to their defense and alliance relationships, but very few of these are built around a wish list that starts with increasing the number of deployed US strategic weapons. Any new deployments of US nuclear weapons are years away, and damage to US alliances is happening now. New weapons will not fix or prevent those rifts from manifesting in real and dangerous ways. And the United States must recognize that it cannot fix a credibility problem with capability alone.

Limiting the damage an enemy can inflict on the United States and its allies, should deterrence fail and a war take place, also remains a long-standing and key US objective. However, the leaders of the United States, Russia, and China have stated that a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought. This echoes the historic statement of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that helped end the Cold War……………………………………………………………. https://thebulletin.org/2025/09/why-president-trump-should-put-off-the-new-nuclear-arms-race-for-one-more-year/