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The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has urged the US and Russia to quickly sign a new nuclear arms control deal, as the existing treaty expired in what he called a “grave moment for international peace and security”.
The last nuclear treaty between the two powers, the New Start agreement, ended on Thursday, formally releasing both Moscow and Washington from a raft of restrictions on their nuclear arsenals and triggering fears of a global arms race.
“For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of … the two states that possess the overwhelming majority of the global stockpile of nuclear weapons,” Guterres said in a statement on Wednesday.
He said New Start and other arms control treaties had “drastically improved the security of all peoples”.
“This dissolution of decades of achievement could not come at a worse time – the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is the highest in decades,” he said, after Russian suggestions of using tactical nuclear weapons early in the Ukraine war.
Russia and the US control more than 80% of the world’s nuclear warheads. Guterres urged Washington and Moscow “to return to the negotiating table without delay and to agree upon a successor framework”.
The milestone is a death knell for more than five decades of arms control at a time of surging global instability. And it could threaten the 1970 nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) – next up for review this year – under which states without nuclear weapons pledged not to acquire them, as long as the weapons states made good-faith efforts to disarm.
The treaty, signed in 2010 in Prague by then presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, limited each side’s nuclear arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, a reduction of nearly 30% from the previous limit set in 2002.
Medvedev said the treaty’s expiry should “alarm everyone”. Obama wrote on social media that the expiry of the treaty “could spark another arms race that makes the world less safe”.
Joe Biden agreed with Russia to extend New Start for five years after he defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election, but tensions between the two countries later soared over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Trump has frequently lashed out at international limits on the US and called for nuclear testing to resume after a long moratorium, although he has not followed up.
But some observers say the expiration of New Start owes less to ideology than to the workings of the Trump administration, where career diplomats are sidelined, simply not having the bandwidth to negotiate a complex agreement.
Trump did not follow up on Russian president Vladimir Putin’s proposal to extend the treaty’s limits for one year. Asked in October in front of his helicopter about the proposal, Trump said it sounded “like a good idea”, but there were no subsequent negotiations.
Russia’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday it considered that both countries were “no longer bound by any obligations or symmetrical declarations within the context of the treaty”.
“The Russian Federation intends to act responsibly and prudently,” it added, but warned it was ready to take “decisive” countermeasures if its national security was threatened.
Pope Leo XIV said each side needed to do “everything possible” to avert a new arms race. “I urge you not to abandon this instrument without seeking to ensure that it is followed up in a concrete and effective manner,” he said at his weekly general audience.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said on Wednesday that Trump would make a decision later and reiterated a call for a new agreement that included China.
“The president’s been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China, because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile,” Rubio said.
China’s nuclear arsenal is growing quickly with an estimated 550 strategic nuclear launchers, which is still well below the 800 each of Russia and the US capped under New Start. France and Britain – treaty-bound US allies – together have another 100.
