The last US-Russia nuclear pact ends tomorrow

Some things are good to let expire — like your ✌️free✌️ LinkedIn Premium trial, or that Salesforce subscription sending you breathless 2am emails about Q4 pipeline hygiene.

But what about the last remaining nuclear treaty between the two powers still sitting on ~90% of the world’s nukes?

That’s what happens tomorrow (Thursday), when the US-Russia New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires, with no clear plans on what’s next.

So with that cheerful swan-dive into your inbox, let’s get you briefed, starting back in…

📅 8 April 2010

The Burj Khalifa had just opened, the first iPad had just gone on sale, and KFC had just announced its new ‘Double Down’ burger, innovatively using fried chicken as the bread.

Meanwhile, President Obama appeared in Prague to sign New START with Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev. This was back when…

• The world still saw Medvedev as a younger, more reformist Russian leader, and
• Lavrov and Clinton had just pushed their famous novelty ‘reset’ button in Geneva.

So with Obama diagnosing US-Russia ties as entering a “dangerous drift”, and their original START treaty having just expired in December 2009, this new treaty pledged to…

• ~Halve their nukes to a maximum of 1,550 deployed warheads, and
• Resume on-site inspections to ensure they were each upholding their end.

In theory, it was all about reducing risks, cutting costs, restoring transparency, and rebuilding trust, all without giving up any meaningful military advantage.

So… did it work?

A State staffer famously mistranslated that big novelty ‘reset’ button as ‘overload’ in Russian, hinting at some of the trouble to come, but things started out okay: the two old foes slashed their nukes while ticking off 328 inspections and ~25,000 notifications.

There were spats, but nothing to stop Biden and Putin signing a 5-year renewal in 2021, until things went sour — Putin attacked Ukraine, then paused his treaty participation after the US helped Ukraine defend itself. But the treaty was already wobbly, because…

• Covid had halted in-person inspections
• Putin argued the US was exploiting loopholes, and
• The US had already elected its own START-sceptic president (Trump).

Their complaints?

Putin argued US defence tech was undermining the treaty by neutralising Russia’s nukes, whether via defence (anti-ballistic systems) or offence (non-nuclear fast-strikes).

And Trump hated the way the treaty tied America’s hands while allowing China’s own massive nuclear ramp-up; he also accused Putin of cheating on a related 1987 treaty via Russia’s new SSC-8 cruise missile. Trump ditched that treaty in 2019, and Putin now uses that missile against Ukrainian cities (turns out it’s got double the range Putin claimed).

And as for those hopes of a new Russia? Medvedev turned out to be Putin’s seat-warmer, not to mention a fascist drunk. And the Kremlin went on to assassinate more critics, steal more turf (Crimea), prop up Syria’s Assad regime, interfere in the 2016 US election, carry out historic cyberattacks (SolarWinds), then start a full war on Ukraine.

And… that pretty much brings us to today! So will the US and Russia extend New START?

Neither side is keen — Putin’s extension offer is only for a year, and wouldn’t include on-site inspections (so it’s worthless). Plus he’s now testing the “invincible weapons” he announced back in 2018 as a very naked way to evade New START limits — eg, his Burevestnik ground-launched missile or his Poseidon drone submarine.

Meanwhile, Trump wants to resume some nuclear testing plus his big Golden Dome defence plans. He also says he can deliver a better deal that’d include China, but Xi has zero interest in slowing down — he just more-than-doubled his own arsenal to ~600 in five years.

Intrigue’s Take

The Cold War brought us dangerously close to nuclear annihilation, whether 1962’s Cuban missile crisis, or 1983’s Able Archer scare. On that last point, MI6’s greatest (known) spy in history, KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, ended up providing the Brits with striking insights into Soviet thinking: even with all available intel confirming Archer was seriously just a US drill, they viewed that evidence itself as mere deception to mask an imminent US strike!

At one point, the Soviets even stole secret NATO war plans confirming the bloc was indeed just defensive, but even that wasn’t enough — Moscow officials later told their exasperated American counterparts: “We simply did not believe that.”

So sometimes Western leaders come along, convinced sheer sincerity and charm might be enough to break the cycle: FDR told his treasury secretary, “if I could just talk to Stalin personally, I could straighten it all out”; Bush Jr famously claimed he’d seen Putin’s soul; Obama tried the big reset button; and Trump still seems to believe in his Putin rapport.

Meanwhile, sure, treaties help — in fact, it was precisely during the Cold War’s scariest years that these two foes agreed on their historic pacts, whether to ban certain nuclear tests, demilitarise Outer Space and the Antarctic, and even halt the yawning ozone hole.

But any Western gesture still risks getting stuck downstream of trust, and trust is ultimately downstream of ideology: that’s because ultimately, Putin is still projecting the Kremlin’s historic “кто кого” (“who’ll vanquish whom“) binary onto the world around it.