President Trump has said that the US and Russia should negotiate a new nuclear arms control treaty instead of extending New START, the last piece of nuclear arms control between the two powers, which expired on Thursday.
“Rather than extend ‘NEW START’ (A badly negotiated deal by the United States that, aside from everything else, is being grossly violated), we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” the president wrote on Truth Social.
The New START treaty caps the number of nuclear warheads each side can deploy at 1,550 and limits the number of deployed and non-deployed strategic launchers to 800. While New START no longer has a built-in extension, Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered a mutual agreement to maintain the limits for another year so the US and Russia could negotiate a replacement treaty.
In 2023, Russia said it was suspending participation in New START, citing US support for Ukrainian attacks on Russian facilities housing nuclear weapons. However, at the time, both the US and Russia stated they would continue to abide by the treaty’s limits, and Putin offered to extend that arrangement.
Putin made the offer in September, and the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that the Trump administration had not responded. According to a report from Axios on Thursday, US and Russian officials have been discussing the issue in Abu Dhabi over the past day.
The Axios report said that the US and Russia may agree to maintain the New START limits for another six months, but that it still needed the approval of both presidents, and Trump’s post on Truth Social suggests he won’t agree.
The Trump administration’s line has been that any new deal must include China, but Beijing says it doesn’t want to be part of a trilateral deal because its nuclear arsenal is much smaller than Washington’s and Moscow’s, a position the Kremlin said it “respects.”
Arms control experts have warned that the end of New START and the lack of a replacement treaty will make the world a much more dangerous place and will likely lead to more nuclear weapons deployments and a new arms race between the two powers.
In his Truth Social post, President Trump, who has said he wants a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027, boasted about his efforts to build up the US military. “The United States is the most powerful Country in the World. I completely rebuilt its Military in my First Term, including new and many refurbished nuclear weapons. I also added Space Force and now, continue to rebuild our Military at levels never seen before. We are even adding Battleships, which are 100 times more powerful than the ones that roamed the Seas during World War II — The Iowa, Missouri, Alabama, and others,” he wrote.
