The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, was signed by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010 and set out a schedule for verifiable and commensurate nuclear arsenal reductions. It was renewed under Republican and Democratic administrations, but it is very "on brand" for strongmen Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to deride international treaties of any sort.
Unfortunately, the sort of muscular bombast they're known for isn't what's kept the world reasonably safe from nuclear war for the last eight decades, since the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Rather, it was a tight web of treaties -- the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, START I and II, New START, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- that kept the whole world safe (or as safe as we could be with ever more nuclear-armed powers proliferating across the planet). That alphabet soup of promises, schedules, and commensurate acts of disarmament, as fragile and incremental as it was, resulted in the dismantlement of 80% of the U.S. and Russian arsenals over the decades.
Now, we are all being dragged in the other direction.
Trump's famous wrecking ball that blasted the East Wing and the Kennedy Center is now aimed at the nuclear treaty architecture built up over the decades. In its place, he proposes to construct a Golden Dome missile defense system to protect the United States from incoming nuclear weapons. And that fool's errand could not only lead us toward nuclear war, but have a price tag in the trillions of dollars.
I Don't Feel Fine
With his administration's gold-plated, AI-enhanced sense of aggression, President Trump is now taking aim at NATO, an alliance the United States helped to build after World War II. His administration is abrogating agreements, leveling tariffs, and threatening to annex Greenland. Europe is getting the message that the United States is no longer a reliable ally, stoking concerns that yet more countries will move to create nuclear arsenals. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin's Russia is investing more money in nuclear weapons and the Russian strongman has actually threatened to use such weapons, while already at war in a part of Europe.
Of course, Russia and the United States are anything but the only nuclear states these days. China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea round out the rogue's gallery of -- to come up with a word of my own -- Obliterables.
In 2024 alone, those nine nuclear-armed states spent more than $100 billion on such weaponry, an 11% increase over the year before, according to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). For example, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Nuclear Notebook finds that China is rapidly and aggressively increasing its nuclear arsenal. Beijing, it points out, has "significantly expanded its ongoing nuclear modernization program by fielding more types and greater numbers of nuclear weapons than ever before."
Throughout Asia and Europe, the leaders of all too many countries are openly discussing regional pacts and the need to develop their own nuclear weapons programs. They are reviving the moribund logic of proliferators -- that only more nuclear weapons can protect us against nuclear weapons. And that is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw in this already endangered world of ours.
Another Treaty to the Rescue?
Instead of all this unilateralism and nuclear proliferation, nuclear and nuclear-adjacent nations should be signing on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It's clear and smart, and its goals are achievable. In essence, it prohibits countries from developing, testing, producing, stockpiling, transferring, or threatening to use (no less actually using) nuclear weapons. And if that seems remarkably comprehensive, it actually goes further, prohibiting nations from allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits assisting, encouraging, or forcing any other country to engage in any of these activities.
Thursday, January 22nd marked five years since that Treaty entered into force as international law and was adopted by a significant majority of the countries on this planet. On that day, I joined a handful of people gathered at the General Dynamics complex in New London, Connecticut (where I live). We celebrated the 74 nations that have ratified the Treaty and the 25 more that have signed it and are in the process of ratifying it. My country, the United States, of course, stands outside of the global consensus on nuclear disarmament.
Panic and Fear, Fear and Panic
That same week after the Doomsday Clock moved four seconds closer to midnight, I wrote an essay for my local paper in New London. In less than 800 words, I tried to describe the massive nexus of decisions and dangers that went along with that four-second nudge closer to a metaphorical midnight for us all.
I shared my essay with my 11-year-old daughter Madeline while we sat in the bleachers at a local pool, watching her older brother swim with his swim team. She's a wise little sixth grader who regularly pays attention when I least expect it. "Look what I did, Madeline," I said, and showed her a screenshot of my article on my phone. The title was "Closing in on Nuclear Midnight; There's Still Time to Disarm." And then I explained to her that it was focused on how the Doomsday Clock had just moved closer to midnight.
"Oh," she said, "I had a full-blown anxiety attack last week because Joanna told me that the flu shot wasn't going to work." Joanna is a seventh-grade friend of hers whose words carry a lot of weight.
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