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Let’s be honest: America needs another nuclear weapon about as much as Donald Trump deserves a Nobel peace prize.
Yet on Thursday, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U S and Russia will expire. When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – New Start – goes away, there will be no limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time in more than 50 years.
That is very bad news.
Agreements like New Start helped end the cold war nuclear arms race. Many Americans are too young to remember that era. If you missed it the first time, I have news for you: it’s back.
During Arms Race 1.0, Washington and Moscow conducted more than 1,700 nuclear tests, contaminating the environment and making our own people sick. Now the US president wants to resume nuclear testing. We also built grotesquely large nuclear arsenals – more than 30,000 weapons each. Today we are down to about 4,000 apiece – still far too many. We spent approximately $10tn in taxpayer money building these weapons – then paid again to dismantle most of them.
For $10tn, you could buy Google, Apple and most of Microsoft.
But the true cost wasn’t just financial. The arms race made the world vastly more dangerous: more weapons, more tension, more chances for miscalculation, more warheads that could be stolen or misused. Anyone who has studied the Cuban missile crisis knows the truth – we survived not because we were wise, but because we were lucky.
No one should want to repeat that history. Yet Arms Race 2.0 is exactly where we are headed.
I was recently struck by Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller A House of Dynamite. It’s a gripping film – and a wake-up call. The movie exposes a truth few in Washington will admit: despite hopes that long-range missile defense will protect us, it won’t. The only reliable way to escape nuclear catastrophe is to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world.
The US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars chasing long-range missile defense, yet it has never delivered dependable protection. The bloated contracts persist and the lobbyists prosper, but the logic is fatally flawed. Long-range defenses don’t work – and they make arms reductions harder. Our adversaries know exactly how to defeat them: build more offensive missiles.
Rather than doubling down on the fool’s gold of missile defense – such as wasting trillions on Trump’s delusional “Golden Dome” – we should focus on what actually works: arms control and arms reductions. Treaties like New Start have cut nuclear arsenals by about 90%, reducing the nuclear threat far more effectively than missile defense ever could. I would take New Start over “Golden Dome” any day. (Trump said he needed to control Greenland in order to build “Golden Dome”. Well, we don’t need “Golden Dome” at all, and we sure don’t need to take over Greenland.)
Today, our decades-long arms-reduction effort is on life support. As A House of Dynamite bluntly observes: “At the end of the cold war, nations reached consensus that we should have fewer nuclear weapons. That era is now over.”
New arms control agreements take years to negotiate. Yet Washington and Moscow have not even begun talks on a replacement for New Start. Vladimir Putin has offered to continue adhering to New Start limits for one year after it expires if the US does the same. That is a good idea, and an overwhelming majority of Americans (91%) say the US should negotiate a new agreement with Russia to maintain current limits or further reduce arsenals. But Trump has been noncommittal, saying, “If it expires, it expires.”
That is unacceptable. We are out of time.
If New Start ends with no commitment to respect its limits, both the US and Russia will be free to expand their strategic nuclear arsenals. A new arms race will officially be under way.
The central lesson of A House of Dynamite – and of history itself – is simple: more nuclear weapons do not make us safer. Nuclear deterrence is not a shield; it is an existential gamble. One mistake, one malfunction, one miscalculation could end everything.
A new nuclear arms race is not the answer. Fewer weapons are.
I have long pushed for deep, verifiable reductions in nuclear arsenals. We must re-engage on arms control not only with Russia, but also with China, and revive diplomacy with North Korea, Iran and other nuclear aspirants. Every warhead removed is one less catastrophe waiting to happen.
If we truly care about future generations, we must have the courage to say: not one more dollar wasted on weapons of mass annihilation. The only nuclear defense worth believing in is disarmament – rooted in treaties, inspections and verification.
As we say goodbye to New Start, we must commit to replacing it – and reject a new arms race. If we abandon nuclear arms control, a new arms buildup will rush in to fill the void. As history teaches us, the only way to win a nuclear arms race is to refuse to run.
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Edward J Markey represents Massachusetts in the US Senate. He is a co-chair of the bicameral congressional nuclear weapons and arms control working group
