The New Start treaty, which expired just days ago, was the last major bilateral agreement between the United States and Russia on nuclear disarmament.
On 5 February 2026, the New Start treaty expired, ending a key chapter in nuclear disarmament. Together with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it was one of the few international agreements aimed at addressing the presence of nuclear warheads in the arsenals of various militaries. While the NPT brought together more than 40 nations, New Start concerned only the two principal global military powers: the United States and Russia. Together, according to the Iriad institute, they control more than 10,000 nuclear warheads — 5,459 Russian and 5,177 American respectively, based on 2025 data — equivalent to approximately 87 per cent of the world total.
In an international context that appears absolutely unfavourable to compromise and dialogue, more than forty years of negotiations on nuclear disarmament between Washington and Moscow have thus effectively come to an end. From the mid-1980s onwards, the United States and the then Soviet Union had agreed to discuss the reduction of strategic nuclear weapons. Previously, the Salt 1 and 2 agreements (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) had instead merely sought to place limits on their production.
The Start programme (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) involved complex negotiations lasting nearly a decade, but ultimately led to the signing of the first agreement, known as Start 1. It was 31 July 1991, and the document was signed by the then presidents of the USA and the USSR, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. It was the last act of particular significance by the Soviet head of state before the coup that led to his removal from power, on 18 August of that same year.
That agreement was followed by a second, Start 2, signed on 3 January 1993. Compared to the first, which set out very concrete measures, the new version appeared more as a declaration of intent between the new presidents of the United States, George Bush, and of the newly formed Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin. The concrete commitments, indeed, were limited. Nevertheless, the agreement would lead to the reduction of numerous warheads, in particular the Russian SS-18 and SS-24, and the American MX Peacemaker and Minuteman III.
The target set was to reach 3,500 American warheads and 3,000 Russian ones by 2003. These goals were never achieved, also due to tensions in the Middle East, the war in the Balkans, NATO's intervention in Kosovo, and the Alliance's enlargement policies in Eastern Europe. Added to this were technical and financial difficulties on the Russian side in the actual destruction of the weapons (which were, moreover, scattered across Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus at the time of the Soviet state's implosion).
The last agreement, the New Start treaty that has just expired, represented an "extension" of Start 2. It included in particular a new system of inspection and verification of compliance with each clause, with a mechanism for mutual monitoring of military sites. As early as 9 August 2022, however, Russia had announced the suspension of American inspections, following the invasion of Ukraine that had occurred a few months earlier, declaring it had taken the decision after Washington had first obstructed Russian inspections in the United States.
No one can know, therefore, whether over the past three and a half years the provisions of New Start were respected by either party. In any case, on a legal level, the agreement could not have been extended again, since the text provided for only one possible renewal, which had already been carried out in 2021. However, had Russian-American diplomatic relations been more cordial, it would have been technically possible to extend part of the agreements relating to the ceiling on warheads. This is indeed what Russia had proposed to the United States last autumn, without, however, receiving a positive response from Washington.
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In this context, it is extremely difficult to identify the risks the world is genuinely facing. It should be recalled that the United States had already withdrawn, in August 2019, from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty), which had been signed in 1987 by Reagan and Gorbachev. That document put an end to the Euromissile crisis, involving medium-range nuclear missiles deployed by both the United States and the USSR on European territory.
Then, in 2023, Russia announced its withdrawal from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, again in the midst of the ongoing war against Ukraine.
The failure to renew New START, then, fits into a dynamic already under way on both sides. Add the widespread arms race to the picture, and the outlook is certainly alarming. A new phase of nuclear weapons production cannot therefore be ruled out: partly to replace ageing warheads, partly to equip armed forces with new ones.
The European Union is fully participating in this trend too, having gone so far as to open up investments considered "sustainable" to those in nuclear weapons. Indeed, the regulation that previously excluded all weapons defined as "controversial" has recently been amended, replacing that term with the more restrictive one of "prohibited".
The text approved by the EU now specifies that only anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, and biological and chemical weapons are excluded from sustainable investments — a label that, at this point, one would objectively have to stop using.
