How awful could it get?  The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expired on February 5, terminating an era of arms control and imposed limits on lunatically contrived nuclear weapons programs of the United States and Russia.  The New START Treaty entered into force on February 5, 2011 and initially imposed a timeline of seven years for the parties to meet the central limits on strategic offensive arms.  Those limits would then be maintained for the duration of the Treaty.

Till its expiry, the countries maintained limits on the following nuclear arms and systems: 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and deployed heavy bombers capable of using nuclear armaments; 1,550 nuclear warheads on all three deployed platforms; and 800 deployed and non-deployed nuclear capable systems (ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and nuclear capable heavy bombers).

Such limits were hardly laudatory, or even exceptional.  The cap of 1,550 nuclear warheads is the sort of thing that would only impress the limited crazed circle that passes for arms negotiators in this field, and the various thanocrats who populate such institutes as RAND.  Such a show is merely intended for both Moscow and Washington to tell other countries with, or without nuclear weapons, that they could impose restraints on their own gluttonous conduct.  Even then, New START, as with all such instruments dealing with limiting nuclear weapons, came with the intended, gaping lacunae.  It failed to cover, for instance, tactical nuclear weapons, nor limit the deployment of new strategic weapon systems.

The treaty also fell into neglect with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Suspended on-site inspections never resumed after 2022.  As François Diaz-Maurin of the........

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